Scams are still abundant in this day and age, and one really popular system designed to separate well-meaning people and their money are massive pyramid scheme-like multi-level marketing operations. What makes them hard to deal with is that they're not the traditional kind of scammer that you can just mess with. They suck people in with promises of being your own boss and giving bonuses for recruiting more people, all while siphoning money out of their own "employees" pockets. One big issue with this is that the convinced don't want to be unconvinced, so when given the facts about predatory companies, the duped people involved just double down. It also provides a lot of strange, interesting and frustrating interactions like these, where a near stranger at this person's gym wanted to tell them about a "new and exciting opportunity."
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Multi-level marketing "companies" are shady businesses that use a pyramid scheme model to rope in desperate people and encourage them to "be their own boss" by hawking stuff like health and beauty supplements to their friends and family over Facebook. The odds that anyone will ever be successful at these is incredibly small, and the companies often pass on the costs to their own "employees," which results in stuff like this guy who reconnected with a high school friend after his dad died so he could sell health supplements.
The hero the city deserved! A solid display in the power of investigative journalism.
This is pretty close to the definition of morally bankrupt. Don't fall for Multi-level Marketing (Pyramid) schemes and if someone tries to get you into one, just run away. This guy's approach to try to sell his old friend health products is about as ineffective as it is psychopathic.
People out there are falling prey to the lofty promises of Multi-Level Marketing Pyramid Schemes everyday. It could be a willful ignorance, a desire to take the bite out of the cake with money-promises filling, that's too good to be true; or some perverse motivation to knowingly f**k other people over. Who's to say. In this case, a woman helps out her old friend with some of her own firsthand knowledge on the "beauty product" she messages her about buying into. Good friends don't let other friends run around in pyramid schemes!
