Mormons and Pyramid schemes go hand in hand. I grew up in a home where my TBM mother bounced from one scheme to another, Tons of overpriced herbal 'whole foods' capsules, diet powders & liquids, magic tinctures and oils, long distance calling cards, trace mineral dirt and colloidal silver. The list goes on and on. All the products or services in a pyramid scheme are simply to make the pyramid legal, but not necessarily safe for your health. Most everything can be found at a health food store for substantially less money. But that's not the purpose of a multi-leveled marketing business. The purpose is to make money--FAST. I'll admit that I've suckered into a couple over my adult years and always feel like a fool afterward.

Orem UT is headquarters to most MLM companys.(multi-level marketing companys) Why is that? And why do they flourish in Utah?

I would hazard to guess that most of the founders of MLM's are mormon. That they used the same organizational money making strategy that the church uses. They use the same speaking technique that the GA's use in conference to instill trust and get you to part with your intellectual reasoning and hard earned dollar.

Why do mormons fall so easily for the get-rich-quick, fly-by-night operations? In my opinion, it's because of the trust factor that mormonism teaches and up-line directors deceptively use. No one even thinks that the nice man in a suit is lying to them(think General Conference). And of course being taught not to question authority. Also the products are sold with 'testimonies' to back them up. Plus, every member has an established group of friends and family and can generate a list of at least 30 potential sign-ups in under a minute.(list women attending Relief Society)

Another factor is MONEY. Instant money. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. No 'working by the sweat of your brow' money. Unfortunately the money it takes to sign up into these MLM's comes from 'working by the sweat of your brow' jobs.

What most people don't realize is that the only money to be made in an MLM is at the very top, and it's done by lying to the lower level people and encouraging them to sign up others. If you sign up 5 people and they sign up 5 people and they sign up 5 people... Did you know that if you truly succeeded in the 5 people sign up rule, after 13 levels the number equals over 6.1 billion people? Try it on a calculator 5x5x5x5...13 times.

MLM=MormonsLosingMoney The church recommends that members not get into get-rich-quick schemes. Of course, that's probably because they'd rather the money be used for tithing. I wish my mom could total up all the money ever wasted on sign up fees, monthly required purchases and inventory along with all the tithing dollars she's ever paid and then deposit that money into an IRA or even just stuff it under a mattress.

Neither one of those will happen, new and newer MLM's will come along all with the promise of being soooo much better than anything out there and countless dollars will line the pockets of already rich shysters.

I'm wondering if there are others out there that harbor the same ill feelings toward these MLM businesses and have lived or seen the fallout they cause on the family level.

My MIL is really big into homeopathics, colloidal silver is one I can remember she takes all the time. 3 times a day she takes a handful of pills that do absolutely nothing for her. Yet she's convinced that everything she takes is a wonder drug and can prevent cancer. These companies convince the people who take them that they aren't FDA approved because they are 'too new'. The reality is that there is no scientific basis that they do anything they advertise. In other words they're selling snake oil.

I can't even begin to imagine how much $$$ she's wasting on that crap.

The fact that she doesn't understand science, is mormon, and a trusting person, makes her the perfect target for these MLM frauds.


Utah has a HUGE dietary-supplement manufacturing and distribution industry. You can in part thank Orrin Hatch for that. If you have netflix watch this documentary: Bigger, Stronger, Faster. The guy in the documentary shows how easy it is to take something like flower, press it into pills, bottle it up, and sell it for over $50 a bottle (he does this in utah). The guy even uses immigrant labor to help him do it in under an hour I recall.

Ya got to admit, it does mirror the Morg's operation where the men at the top are the only ones getting paid while everyone else runs around getting people to do all the work while the 19 year olds are sent out to recruit more members. Looks like it's modelled after the Morg to me...

Colloidal silver can give you a condition called argyria, which makes your skin turn blue.

My mother is obsessed with her appearance, and if she turned blue, I don't know what she would do. I would put her on suicide watch, or something.

Is pre-paid legal one of those? I know that my friends dh got into that for some years and it almost ruined their marriage....

There are more headquartered there than any other state:

http://www.mlmwatch.org/11Legal/utahbill.html

I think it is partly because of so many RMs with such well honed sales skills and no other jobs.

What about NuSkin? Is that crap still around?

It's also interesting that people that buy into the MLM hype also buy into conspiracy theories, FDA is bad, government is bad, must have guns to protect yourself and your food storage. One of the most interesting MLM's my mom tried to get me into was one back in the early 90's. According to the founder of the then MLM Food Storage Business, a big earthquake was on its way and the need to purchase food storage was huge. But one shouldn't just buy any kind of storage, they should buy his brand. This guy knew all the secrets of the U.S. Geological Survey(conspiracy to keep info of impending earthquake from the general masses) and if you signed up in his company he'd let you in on his findings. All lies, of course. The more you purchased, the more info you were entitled to. My mom bought it hook, line and sinker because she's so quick to believe anyone that talks smack about the government. She recommended I get a gun to protect my food storage from the mayhem that would inevitably ensue from nation wide power outages.

I was TBM at the time and I asked her why the Profit hadn't warned us of this? What did this other guy know that God's servant didn't? Her response was something like, the profit isn't going to tell us every little thing. Besides, we already know that in the last days there will be a huge earthquake that will sink California. This is that earthquake.(at that time the 1989 San Francisco earthquake had already happened but it hadn't caused the major country wide destruction so it was reported that this was only the beginning of more to come.)

I told my mom 'no' and she didn't call me for several weeks, in a pout. The massive earthquake didn't happen, the MLM company disappeared, and what had been left of my parents 401K had been liquidated into over-priced food storage which eventually went to waste. You'd think she would have learned, but no. There have been a steady stream of more MLM's since, but that's another story.