Multi-Level Marketing - You Wouldn't Con Your Own Mother!

[monkey0506]

When I was younger, I really fit the part of "momma's boy", but as I've gotten older our relationship has undergone drastic changes. I tend to think of myself as a generally logical and rational person. I spend a lot of time contemplating my own actions, as well as the actions of others. I simply do not understand my mother. She has been divorced twice, and the boyfriend she has been living with for the last 3 years (who actually did propose to her 3 years ago) is fundamentally the same as the two men she's divorced before. Perhaps my mother thrives on being mistreated.

Her current boyfriend is different than my biological father and my step-father (the latter of which raised me from age 5) in one way though. He is obsessed with money-making schemes. He won't sell his thousands of comics (not an exaggeration, many most are in mint condition), and he quit his stable job (to be fair, he retired), but he will go and sell flags on the side of the street. More recently he has engaged my mother into a Multi-Level Marketing "business" (I'll withhold the name for damage control purposes). As with any MLM, there is a hefty fee for "signing up" followed by exceptionally high recurring monthly fees. This particular MLM is working under the ploy of selling discounted services, which of course are rarely (if ever) actually seen or utilized.

For nearly a year my mother has been hounding myself and my siblings, making absolutely sure to bring up this "company" in every single discussion, email, etc. My two younger sisters have actually been brought into the scheme by my mom, who is paying their fees (they have no other association with it; they don't actually care about this at all). Despite voicing our own concerns, my mom, largely reinforced by her boyfriend, continues to insist that there is nothing wrong with an MLM. She cites "companies" such as Amway and Mary Kay. It's funny that as successful as these MLMs all are that I've never heard of a single individual actually making substantial profit off of them.

I have tried everything I can think of to make it clear that she is alienating her own children. Every time I mention it, the entire discussion devolves into her simply "explaining" to me how this business is going to give her the financial stability to travel the world and leave an inheritance behind for all of us. My best efforts to explain the underlying fundamental problems of MLMs have failed me. So, I'm turning to you AGSers. Help? Advice?

I also tried referring my mom to read this article about the issues behind the MLM structure... She blatantly disregarded it, without even reading. :/

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Advice:  Back off.

Humans are plagued with the 'get rich quick' sickness.  Just look at lotteries, but can you convince someone who dumps $20-50 bucks a month praying for that win that their chances of winning are nearly infintesimal?  No.

People involved in pyramid scheme shenanigans, etc, almost always have to get burned to learn their lesson, like my brother did.  He's a few dollars short but a whole hell of a lot more discerning now.

[Khris]

That's funny. There's a quite large group of people who are convinced that they are going to live forever in some kind of Haven after they die. Or Heaven, something like that. And you can't talk them out of this delusion either.

All kidding aside, do you want to a) convince your mom that MLM doesn't work, b) only prevent her from loosing a lot of money or c) stop her nagging you about joining?

a and b are pretty hard, but c should be relatively easy. If my mom nagged me with something like that, I'd simply bore her to death by also telling her lengthy stories about something she doesn't care about. Next time she starts, tell her in detail about the AGS modules you've written so far. Maybe she'll stop bugging you then?

[Eric]

My advice is that if you can't talk her out of it, to at least steer your mom away from MLMs involving health food. These are worse, because you don't only have to talk about it / get the hard sell to participate all the time, but you also get served with the product at dinner.

I had a family member who was involved with one, and if anyone ever serves me acai berry juice again, I will likely involuntarily punch them in the face. Be forewarned.

[Igor Hardy]

There might be one other factor to this. If the parent starts getting "instructed" by the offspring on how to act and spend money, she/he starts to appear senile and now dependent on the children to survive in the modern world. By now your mother might even be really afraid she made a bad decision, but still stubbornly clinging to her sense of independence (which is one of the most important things to everybody). I've seen these kind of conflicts between my mother and her parents.

In your place, I'd let her know your exact stance on MLMs, but also make it clear that it's her money and she can spend it on whatever she likes - mistakes happen. You simply are not going to pay any attention to how this money-making scheme progresses.

[monkey0506]

I sent my mom a rather long message on Facebook (significantly less tedious than trying to do this over the phone) explaining that I do not want to discuss this with her any more (in any way, shape, size, or form). I went to great lengths to explain that I am not upset with her, and that I do not want this to impair our relationship. I explained that regardless of the channel of communication, that if she includes me and this particular MLM together, that I will be removing myself - if I'm on the phone with her, I will end the call; if we are in person, I will walk away; etc. I specifically asked her to refrain from including me in emails, messages, or posts that make mention of the MLM. I explained that if her boyfriend mentions the MLM that I will react similarly. I acknowledged that she is a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions and forming her own opinions. I acknowledged that we have been butting heads about this, stated that I will be backing down, and politely asked her to follow suit.

I am still interested to hear any other feedback on the situation. The posts here are greatly appreciated. I can tend to be so opinionated that it is sometimes difficult for me to recognize when I should be gracefully stepping back from an argument instead of trying to forcefully assert my own correctness. So, we'll see what happens!

[Ryan Timothy B]

She sounds exactly like my mother, except I don't think she's fallen for a get rich quick scheme. My advice: Do what Progz suggests. There is no point arguing with her or trying to hit her over the head with the proverbial frying pan.


My mother when she and my father were starting out their grocery store many years ago, he somehow convinced her to take 49% of the store ownership and he took the 51%. Now that they're broken up, she claims he conned her into it because there was no reason for it other than not needing two signatures on everything - which I honestly agree with, only because they were married with each other. Obviously it was a bad choice for her.

She made some bad decisions after the break up. They were doing the whole court thing battling for who owns what, etc. Trying to manage the spousal support and child support. All those shenanigans. Well she cracks easily under pressure and finally decided WTF and traded her 49% of the business (not the store property - just the business itself) for the house. Which was clearly a bad call since she'd lose a steady paycheck from it... but she got a house. Shortly afterward she met a new man and fell in love too quickly. She was somehow convinced to pay off his $30k of debt and to buy him a car (she added all these things to the house mortgage - which was NEARLY paid off). As you can guess, he broke up with her and he now has no debt and a free car (she did put a lien against it - but still, it's a free car).

Anyway, now that she was single again and didn't have his assistance on the mortgage and bills, she had to sell her house and downsize to a very poor house with basement leaking and just a pure headache. (On a side note: my father and her were sort of getting along at this point and she knew he's pretty good with real estate so she asked his advice before buying it. He told her no and pointed out the main issues. Mold on the plywood under the washroom. Cinder blocks as a basement wall instead of concrete. But she was too set on the house and she wanted to believe he was misleading her. She ended up having a leaking bathtub and had to replace the flooring. Then the cinder blocks acted as a waterfall in the basement anytime it rained outside. I think him being right about that ended up fueling her with more hatred towards him later on)

She still gets spousal support from him (it's been something like 15 years since they broke up). He's already sold the store and promised her a substantial amount of money from the sale but his lawyers have it locked down until the agreement to stop spousal support comes to an end. I understand why she wants to fight it, it's a comfortable paycheck every month PLUS the amount from the sale - instead of just the large one time payment.

I completely agree he shouldn't have to pay her spousal support anymore. I think she should take the lump sum (only because the lawyer fees are adding up quite a bit, I know he'll win the battle, and then she'll have less money overall when it's all said and done). She should also get a real job and not work a measly 10-20 hours a week; just because she has the spousal support to balance her.

I tried to remain neutral. I love my dad, I love my mom. I don't want to pick sides. She used to tell me if I really loved her that I'd step between the two and I should say something like: "Yo, Dad. If you really loved me, you'd stop your attacks at mom or you'll never see me. Yo.". That's what she badly wanted me to do. She tried on a weekly basis to get me to do this. I kept telling her no - it's her battle and that they got themselves into this mess on their own.

You know what I did one day when she was texting me and being bitter, again. I told her what I thought she should do. I told her to take the money. Stop the spousal support because it's her only last tie to my father. And finally told her to get a real job (like everyone else in the world) so she wouldn't have to complain about being broke. This was about two years ago. Guess what happened. I haven't seen her since the day I decided to tell her what I felt. She had told me to never see her again and that she's disowned me as her son. And since she liked me the most out of my two other brothers, she disowned them too since: if I feel this way, they must as well.


Basically, sometimes it's just not worth it. If I were to go back to about 5 years ago I simply wouldn't have responded to her long emails or texts of hatred towards him. I never would have given her my advice. Just because my advice usually matched what my father was trying to get her to do, she believed I was just like him.

-Edit: Corrected typos.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Wow Ryan, that's pretty harsh.  Any mother that would disown a child for offering some heartfelt advice needs counseling in the very least.  If I were put on the spot I'd say she has a persecution complex.

[Andail]

Wow, I'm starting to feel lucky I don't have this kind of problems with my parents. Sounds horrible! My condolences.

[Anian]

Wow, I'm starting to feel lucky I don't have this kind of problems with my parents. Sounds horrible! My condolences.

My family has a level of keeping secrets from each other and talking behind backs, but yeah, nothing this extreme.

[Ryan Timothy B]

If I were put on the spot I'd say she has a persecution complex.

After a Google search, I must say, it definitely sounds like she may have a slight case of this. One very noticeable instance was that she used to fear her brother because a few times in her past he used to get physically violent. So my whole younger life, before he died, she used to fear him. We would go to Disney Land and such and she would dress us all in bright orange because she feared her brother would kidnap us? I can understand a mother doing this to easily spot her children amongst the crowd, but to actually tell us that she fears her brother will kidnap us is a little odd. We were constantly drilled with "safe words" if a stranger ever pulled us aside and said our parents are hurt and they're going to take us to the hospital, etc (which I can't say is a terrible idea - but it definitely had us fearing every stranger we encountered while we were younger).

Any mother that would disown a child for offering some heartfelt advice needs counseling in the very least.

The worst thing about counseling is that they only hear one side of the story. Overall she was always a very normal person, just had some personality quirks that were very odd.

She actually had one instance where she told me what her closest friends (her employers) had thought about us; her children. She apparently told them a story that happened about 4 years ago, saying that I was crying to her about how my father doesn't spend time with me. Which by the way was overly exaggerated. I had simply said something like: So what if I don't see him all that often but at least when I do, he doesn't make me feel guilty like she tries to do. - So she tells me her friends think we sound like little children who are begging for their parents attention? Which is why I don't believe one on one counseling would ever do her any good. She has always exaggerated stories much beyond the truth.

So, yes. The more I think about it, you're sounding more and more right about that on the spot diagnosis, Progz. lol




Anyway, I never meant to derail this thread. I also normally would never air dirty laundry like this, but in the past 2 years I've accepted the idea that I'll never see her again, so I figured maybe my unfortunate and some-what related story could assist Monkey. Mainly because your mom seems to be very firm in her decisions and ideas of this business. Mixed with the love she has for this man seems to blind her from the obvious truth that you're drilling into her head.

The main thing I fear about you trying to force her to stop this business idea is that one day in the future, if she ends up going broke because of this, she may actually hold some hatred towards you just because you were right. I also agree with Ascovel about parents disliking advice from offspring.




I actually have one similarly related story to the get rich quick scheme. My father actually had fallen for this about 5 years ago. It all started with his best friend who was a very intelligent and successful man who owned like 7 grocery stores; my father only owned one. One day a gentleman approached his friend with an advertising proposal that should bring in $100-200 a month extra income, and upwards. Basically the idea was that he would install several television sets throughout the grocery store along with a central computer that would stream advertising from a central agency.

Well.. the red flags go up once you hear the financial details of this arrangement. Each TV were to cost somewhere around $10k each. This company arranged that you had a loan for TV's and the service for about 10 years. That you were supposed to pay off this loan each month, but with every dollar you pay, they return to you plus advertising earnings. It was all written in a contract and this friend of my father had his lawyer look it over. Everything checked out legally. To break it down, you basically pay them each month and they pay you back dollar for dollar, plus the advertising income.

So this friend accepted the deal and put about 7 TV's in each of his stores.

Everything was running smoothly. He was paying his loan each month and was receiving his equal payment back plus the advertisement earnings. Which to me, was a ridiculously low amount per month of maybe $40 per store. To me, that's not worth it. You still have to pay the electricity these TV's are constantly burning.

So it worked. It appeared to be a good deal. So my father jumped on it. He also put in 7 TV's throughout his store. He was later earning the same $40 per month and having his loan payments paid in full back to him by this company.

This company ended up putting TV's in something like 40 stores throughout Ontario. Which was something like $3 million in total of loans. Well guess what happened. This company somehow had a loophole in their contract - I'm not a lawyer so I don't quite know what they did to get around this. But the company sold all their loans to another company, person, or bank, whichever. Likely for a lesser value. The likely hood is that he probably walked away with maybe $2 million. The kicker is that once he sold the loans, he didn't have to return the loan payments per month for each of the stores. So each store was left with a loan of around $70k that they were no longer receiving an equal payment back. They couldn't stop paying or they'd damage their credit rating with the third party that purchased the loans.

Basically my dad was left with a balance around: -$70,000
And his friend was left with a balance of approximately: -$490,000

Many of the stores that were caught in this scam all hired a group lawyer and tried to sue the company that scammed them all. But I'm pretty sure there was nothing they could do about it.

It was a genius scam and a part of me really admires the work and success of it all. I have no idea why my father fell for it. It didn't seem worth it to me, and I'm not saying that because of hindsight, it was really stupid for a measly $40 a month of profit to now having a $70k loan to pay off.

[EchosofNezhyt]

Wow, I'm starting to feel lucky I don't have this kind of problems with my parents. Sounds horrible! My condolences.

I don't have these problems with my mom(only parent) but man my family is messed up.