- I ended up having to block their numbers.
- I started running to my car
and he started running after me.
- $450.
- $600.
- $5000.
(upbeat music)
- I was like 21, 22 years old I think,
and I met this guy at a club.
This guy, he liked to wear a suit everywhere.
Had this matte black Jeep that he was obsessed with.
And he talked about financial freedom.
Like, putting down the nine to five jobs and everything.
So, I was really young, I was really stupid
and I was kind of enticed by this swagger
and this character that he put on.
We got involved and I think maybe the second time
that I ever hung out with him,
he said he was taking me on a date
and he didn't tell me where we were going.
And he took me to one of the meetings,
which they call a plan.
I signed up basically right away.
I'm a nurse, I was back then as well
and I made good money, I was putting money away
in my savings, so I wasn't worried
about working for the man or being an entrepreneur
or having my own business or anything,
that's never been my mindset or anything
and I was never interested in that.
I was really just wrapped up in
how much I really liked this guy
and this business was the only thing that mattered to him,
so I stupidly thought that if I was involved
and I was doing it, that I would matter to him too.
The first meeting and all the meetings basically
that I went to, there was a lot of young people
around my age involved and so
that kind of legitimized it to me.
And it was kind of put out there as like,
yeah, we go up to trips to Spokane
and all these places and we have these really big meetings
with all these people who are super excited
for building this and everything.
And once I got roped into it,
I realized that it wasn't fun,
it was actually a nightmare.
You are pushed heavily to buy in from your own company,
that equaled about $600 per month.
I met that every month for about two years
and I bought things I didn't want, things I didn't need,
but I felt a lot of pressure.
It was focused less on selling and more on recruitment
because that was where the money was.
The money was getting people to be your downline,
to be underneath you to form that pyramid
so that you can be at the tippy top
and could be making the most money.
And I felt really bad asking them
to be spending that much money on this business
because I knew what it was like for me
and I didn't like feeling like I was preying on people.
To put it bluntly, my experience was a disaster.
It kind of encompassed my entire life
and that is what my life was for two years,
was just this business through in and through in.
I went to meetings several times a week
and I was working a nine to five job at this time.
And I spent every time after work with this guy
and we would go to meetings and I would sit through them
and they would be boring and long
and it would be the same stories from the same people.
They would go on till like one or two o'clock in the morning
and so frequently I wasn't getting much sleep
and I was having to get up early for work.
I kind of slowly lost who I was by being a part of this.
We were told that if we needed any counseling
or any advice or anything that we should council
with our upline.
We are pushed to do that if we had
any relationship problems, if we had any financial issues,
things that even, you know, didn't have anything
to do with the business we were told
that we should talk to our upline about.
And I really see now, and it wasn't evident
to me at the time, but I really see now
how making it so that your only option
was really to talk to other people
in the business worked to brainwash you
and alienate you from other outside opinions of people
that might give you the wrong opinion.
And it works to keep you apart from you know,
from the outside world and to kinda help plug you in
to feeling like this was the only way of life.
I left the MLM and it was kind of a slow burn
but I left the MLM after I had finally had enough.
I think I'd had enough blows to my self-esteem
and to my sanity from the business
and from also this relationship that I had decided that,
you know, it was no longer worth my time.
So the situation kind of escalated,
I went to leave and he kind of followed me
into the parking garage where my car was parked
and I was telling him to leave me alone
and trying to walk away from him,
so I started running to my car
and he started running after me.
And I got into my car and I closed the doors
and locked them, he started pounding on the door
and asking me to open it up and I drove off.
I sped out of the parking garage
and was on my way home and then I saw
that he was following me in his car.
And this scared the crap out of me.
I contemplated you know, getting a restraining order
or something like that.
But he actually never showed his face again.
I lost my self-esteem, I lost my self-worth,
I lost who I was, I lost friends,
I lost time and money.
I spent two years wasted.
I felt like I was kind of that like a pariah,
like a person that, you know, some people
didn't wanna touch again after that.
I learned a lot of valuable lessons.
They talked a lot about, you know,
don't let someone take your dreams away.
And that's exactly what I did
by being involved in that business,
was letting them take my dream from me.
And it feels very freeing to have gotten back
onto the path of where I belong
and feeling like I belong somewhere finally
because I definitely didn't belong
doing what I was doing there.
- When I first heard about the MLM,
I actually heard through a friend
who was trying to reconnect with me
and she ended up asking me to go get coffee.
And that's when we started talking about life goals
and what we wanted to do with our lives in the future
and that's when she also kinda hinted
that she'd be retiring in two years.
Obviously I wanted to hear more,
so that's when she asked me if I wanted to meet
with her mentor to get a little bit more information
and set up another coffee meeting.
The reason I was so intrigued is because
I was not only a full-time college student,
but I was also a full-time employee at a desk job
and I was trying to pursue my photography
and my music career at the same time,
so hearing that someone was gonna retire in two years,
fully financially free of any debts
and be able to be rich for the rest of their life
by doing absolutely nothing.
I wanted to get in on this.
It seemed like a way for me to be able
to pursue my dreams and fund my dreams
without me having to have two or three jobs
in order to do that.
They didn't tell me much about the company
when I first asked about it,
after about three coffee meetings
I ended up going to the bigger meeting
where I finally heard a little bit more information
because they deemed me worthy.
The meeting was a little weird,
it was about 20 to 30 people in someones apartment
and this lady was giving a presentation
on a whiteboard and talking about
the entire process, how it works.
As she was drawing on the whiteboard
she kept repeating, it's not a pyramid scheme,
it's not a pyramid scheme,
don't tell anyone that you're doing this
because they're gonna tell you that it's a pyramid scheme.
And they also told me not to tell any of my loved ones,
not to post about it on any social media platform.
So it kinda just triggered a bunch of red flags,
which, I don't know why I lasted six months in that place.
They asked me to sign up after the bigger meeting
and my friend ended up signing me up at her apartment.
As soon as I signed up, that's when
they started telling me about the monthly fees.
So how my friend explained it,
is basically when you sign up,
every month we had to spend $450 a month,
for all the products that we technically sell
but not really.
On top of the money that we had to spend,
we also had to spend an hour a day listening to a podcast,
15 minutes a day reading one of
our motivational books and articles,
and sending voice memos every single day
to our mentors or the people higher above us.
It also cost me a lot of time
because every week we had to meet
for two to three hours with our smaller group.
And then we also had one meeting every month
for like a district.
And then we had two annual events,
where we had to not only pay for the event,
that was around $200, but we also had to pay
for the hotel any gas that we spent or flights
that we had to pay for to get there.
The experience for working for an MLM was a bit weird,
because we weren't selling products,
it was more like we were recruiting people
to work under us and keep recruiting people.
A pyramid scheme.
Again, I don't know why I didn't see this coming.
But how it worked was that because we were obligated
to spend $450 a month on product,
that would go not only towards me
but to the people that were higher above me,
so everyone below me would be doing the same
and kind of making me money while they make money.
It was a bit difficult to try to recruit people
because although I'm an outgoing people
I just didn't wanna bother anyone
with any, like business endeavors
and you know, take up too much of their time.
So I didn't really go out of my way much.
Even my mentors were asking me to go out to malls
and ask at least three people a day
about their retirement plans.
But I was too scared to talk to strangers
and it was just really messing with my anxiety
and I just didn't wanna do it.
I tried to stay in as long as possible,
mostly to please my friend that signed me up,
but it started getting just a little too sketchy.
I ended up leaving the MLM about six months in
because I started feeling a bit of pressure financially
and I was trying to pay off some debts
and I couldn't do that if I had to pay $450 a month
to this company every single month,
so I decided to leave, I texted my friend and her mentor
and I told them that I would be leaving the company.
They kept texting me and asking me to stay
and they kept trying to, you know,
convince me to not leave their group.
I ended up having to block their numbers.
And then I had to sign so many papers
just to cancel my memberships for all of these things
that they made me sign up for.
In total what I lost from this MLM
was probably around $5000 in six months
as well as 20 to 30 hours of my time every week.
And a lot of my social life,
because most of my free time was actually
going to this company and going to all these meetings,
not even recruiting people, just the meetings
and the time that I had to put in.
Some advice that I would give to anyone trying to join
an MLM is to research the company,
just make sure they're not sketchy,
make sure you know what you're getting in to,
but most importantly, just don't do it (laughing).