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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Selling Vitamins! Here's the thing: you get 3 people under you selling vitamins, and you make money off of their sales! Then each of them gets 3 people, and now you're making money off of 9 people! And so on and so forth.

Our program pays you for 3 levels below you in our sales matrix, so if you have 5 people per level you can be receiving profits from 125 people selling vitamins!

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MLM. Run! Ruuuuuuuun!

Sounds awesome. Sign me up!

...and with only an $800 up front investment I'm sure.

All Ponzi schemes are the same.

You are not doing it justice. MLM is a much better, evolved variant of ponzi scheme compared to the garden variety.

Also MLM is, crucially, legal.

IIRC, MLMs are only illegal if they pay commissions based on recruitment of other members.

If an MLM pays commissions on product sales (either directly or through your recruits), then it's perfectly legal.

A tip to anyone thinking of starting an MLM scheme: if you ARE thinking of building an MLM scheme around your product, you NEED an MLM-specialised lawyer to validate that your scheme is legal in each of the jurisdictions you plan to operate in (most likely, US and UK).

Also, some MLMs sell decent products (I like Pampered Chef) which makes it far from a scam.

MLM is not scamming the customers, it's scamming the "sales agents" by promising them riches most of them won't get due to ponzi nature of the scheme.

Yeah but if you join today I'll let you in for $750.

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