Whenever someone brings up Utah Mormons and MLMs invariably another poster will say how "it's not just them". I live in the burbs of the biggest city of the US and neither DH or I know anyone involved in this nonsense but dang if almost everyone of our huge UT TBM fam isn't up to their ears in this stuff.

The latest is New U Life hgh gel. Thankfully we don't see these people much.

Why are people so stupid?

There are two issues here:

1) It is an MLM. Enough said.

2) The product is [supposedly] Human Growth Hormone....which NO ONE should be messing around with! Jeez!

Being curious, I looked it up and it claims to be "homeopathic HGH"...which may mean that it has virtually no HGH in it at all.

Like most MLMs, the product itself is most likely of no importance at all other than as a pretext for sucking people into this latest version of the classic pyramid scheme, which is all about recruiting suckers to recruit other suckers to recruit other suckers...ad infinitum...each of whom will be expected to pay for their "sales kit" or whatever it is that the MLM requires for them to officially "join". Then they will be eligible to officially recruit other suckers and will be entitled to a percentage of the admission fees paid by all of the suckers in the chain of suckers that they started.

Each successfully recruited sucker will have visions of early retirement, vacation homes and yachts planted in their brains by brochures and motivational seminars. Then they'll find out that recruiting other suckers is not as easy as they thought and often requires more commitment than a full-time job and gradually the visions of early retirement, vacation homes and yachts will shrivel up and die.

The one thing that will never, never happen is making a reasonable profit simply by selling the product that is supposedly the reason for the whole MLM organization being created in the first place. Of course that's because if the product itself was really intrinsically worth anything it wouldn't be sold through an MLM scheme that focuses more on sucker recruitment than on product sales.

Nailed it !

SIL posted a video of BIL taking his latest shipment of the stuff out of the mailbox. I thought he was going to cry. I almost got sick.

My ex is a prime target, but I kept him from ever joining one. My dad didn't raise me that way! (My dad was not a true TBM.)

My ex has been catfished 3 or 4 times. Pretty insane. The last one I was really worried about and I wrote Dr. Phil. The show called me twice. I pointed out the problems with this catfish and suddenly the guy up and got in a car wreck and was on life support. I know we got too close for comfort. ha ha Problem solved.

Yes, my ex is a prime target for MLMs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/05/2019 01:39PM by cl2.

What do you expect from people who and conditioned to peddle snake oil from an organization founded by a con artist.

If you are good at selling bullshit and you are surrounded by a bunch of gullible dolts, yeah what could develop there?

Maybe because in Utah if something sounds too good to be true, well then it must be true.

People are looking for ways to make a buck there. They're financially strapped, more often than not. The housing costs have outpaced the rate of inflation and wages and the job market.

Utahns are hurting in their wallets.

I remember when I lived in the Morridor and even Sacramento, before moving to the East coast that Mormons where I lived would hold meetings for the latest/newest MLM racket someone was running to drum up support.

That's one thing about Mormons that hasn't changed since I moved away ....

Even the wealthy and really intelligent fall for some of the things around Utah.

I worked with scientists, chemists, mathematicians who got caught up in some scam that involved a few church leaders back in the late 1970s or early 1980s. They were NOT poor by any means. They worked at Thiokol, which was one of the best paying employers in Utah at the time. One of my friends lost $50,000. Others lost around that amount. That was the 1970s/80s--imagine how much it would amount to nowadays?

This guy who I was good friends with told me about it and said he and his wife had looked it over really well and could find nothing wrong. I told him I wouldn't do it.

My dad taught us that if it sounds too good to be true, it isn't. That is the wisdom I was raised on. Of course, I was the one in the family who bought into mormonism more than the rest including my parents.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2019 12:20PM by cl2.

cl2 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Even the wealthy and really intelligent fall for
> some of the things around Utah.
>
> I worked with scientists, chemists, mathematicians
> who got caught up in some scam that involved a few
> church leaders back in the late 1970s or early
> 1980s. They were NOT poor by any means. They
> worked at Thiokol, which was one of the best
> paying employers in Utah at the time. One of my
> friends lost $50,000. Others lost around that
> amount. That was the 1970s/80s--imagine how much
> it would amount to nowadays?
>
> This guy who I was good friends with told me about
> it and said he and his wife had looked it over
> really well and could find nothing wrong. I told
> him I wouldn't do it.
>
> My dad taught us that if it sounds too good to be
> true, it isn't. That is the wisdom I was raised
> on. Of course, I was the one in the family who
> bought into mormonism more than the rest including
> my parents.


Was it a gas additive by any chance? That's the time I met married my Dh and lived in a small UT town. It's also the first introduction I had to TBMs and MlMs (and it wasn't pretty).

My last boyfriend from Minneapolis is/was into selling gas additives. He thought that was going to make him a fortune. He isn't a Mormon, but a devout Lutheran. So there is a religious zealotry connection albeit a different vein.

He likes to sell and sees himself as a salesman. If you have that kind of a personality then things like MLM's kind of make more sense to someone perhaps. I never was into marketing because I'm more of an introvert.

Even selling religion requires a certain personality type. I cannot stand proselytizing. The same fervor that some people market their religion with takes the same type of personality to market a MLM IMO. In Mormonism there are a considerable number of extroverts who thrive on that atmosphere.

Paul H. Dunn played a role in assuring faithful Mormons that it was legit (when it wasn't).

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/11/12/Grant-Affleck-convicted-of-eight-counts-of-defrauding-investors/8527469083600/

I remember being completely apalled when my nevermo Aunt and Uncle from NY came to visit us in UT. We went over to my TBM MIL's house and my TBM BIL (who had never met my aunt and uncle) proceeded to strong-arm these very kind and well-mannered people into buying his cr*p.

In the few years after that we were inundated with people hitting us up to get involved in all kinds of schemes. We succumbed to a few (despite my protests, generational TBM DH has a few too many of the "sucker" genes and was seemingly powerless to resist). We moved across the country and have lived the rest of our lives without being hit up by anyone to get involved with any of this nonsense.

Once, a few years after we were married DH took a trip back to UT and came home with ...magnets for back pain. Since then there have been a few attempts to suck us into various garbage (a few years ago TBM SIL was hawking some sort of supplement Donny Osmond was into...Protamdin or something?

Since leaving Mormonism Dh's "sucker" genes have gone into recession. I'm grateful for social media so that when a random TBM UT relative makes a totally unexpected phone call, we know why.