I lost over $30k & 4 years of my life to an MLM – I regret it and now I’m warning others to learn from my m... - The US Sun
AN American woman has revealed how she got sucked into a multilevel marketing company that left her $30,000 poorer.
The woman, who posts under the name Fedacheezz on YouTube, said she got recruited to join as a teenager and ultimately dropped out of college to focus on her "business" – and was convinced that it would make her a millionaire.
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"I wanted to talk about the time I lost over $30,000 and four years of my life," she said.
Fedacheezz joined a multilevel marketing company, or MLM.
MLMs have a pyramid-shaped business structure in which newer participants report to whoever recruited them – and the person who recruited them makes money off of their sales.
Many MLMs insist they are not the same as pyramid schemes because they sell products.
Well-known MLMs include Amway, Herbalife, Young Living, Monat, doTerra, Rodan + Fields, and Lularoe.
Though Fedacheezz didn't share the name of the one she joined, she said it's popular and has been around for a long time.
"I was naive, and I thought, how lucky and special I am that this special opportunity fell into my lap and I'm gonna be a millionaire! I really believed it," she said.
"I've been holding up all these feelings of loss and sadness and regret for years now, and I just want to let it all out."
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She recalled that she was just 19 when she first started with the business.
"I was a kid, I knew nothing about anything. I was barely a sophomore in college," she said.
She and her sister were also having family problems and felt vulnerable, craving a "safe space" with "positive energy."
"We were like the perfect targets for an MLM," she said.
Her sister joined first, telling her about the exciting trip to California she was talking for the company and introducing her to others involved with the MLM.
One day, she took her to the house of an older woman in the MLM.
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"What really got me intrigued was I saw this lady who knew my mom since I was eight years old ... and I was like, 'Oh, she's doing this business too?'" she said.
Fedacheezz agreed to spend $150 to go on the trip to California with her sister.
"I didn't know what I was getting myself into. All I knew was I was excited and it seemed like a positive thing," she said.
On the trip, another woman told her about the business and explained what she would be doing if she joined.
First, the other woman said, Fedacheezz should stop buying essentials like shampoo and snacks from other businesses, but instead buy them from her own business under the MLM.
She'd be expected to spend about $300 this way each month to maintain a required point value.
I was naive, and I thought, how lucky and special I am that this special opportunity fell into my lap and I'm gonna be a millionaire!
Fedacheezz
Then she would get her friends and family to do the same thing, and she would earn based on their joining and spending, with "explosive growth."
"You're just gonna be this millionaire, this successful person. You're never gonna have to work for anyone, you're just gonna be this boss a** woman," she said.
Still, she wasn't sold until she attended one of the MLM's events on the trip, which she described as so exciting and bursting with positive energy.
There was a musical performance, with everyone dancing along, and top earners went on stage to talk about their success.
"If you were at a negative place in your life, and you attended this event, it was so easy for you to feel overwhelmed with positive energy," she said.
She thought, "I don't know what this is, but I want to be part of it."
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The event went on until late into the night, and by the end, she felt both sleep-deprived and "high off all this energy" – so she agreed to pay $180 to get a starter kit.
"After that, they want to quickly get you involved in the system because they know ... they can quickly lose you because MLMs are very heavily associated with the words 'pyramid schemes,' and they know.
"They would tell you when you started, 'Don't talk to anyone, just write down a list of all the people you know, and then we're gonna help you talk to them and introduce this business.'"
She said that they told people who joined that if they talked to friends and family alone, they'd "scare them off" because "you're not gonna know how to say this properly."
"I just kept going and getting deeper and deeper into this thing for four years," she said.
"How did I lose $30,000? Long story short, I quit college. I quit college, can you believe that?
"I just straight-up walked out of my college classes and decided I wanted nothing to do with this path of working nine to five. I just want to do my business and I just want to be successful.
"I was convinced. They had me convinced that I was gonna be a successful business owner.
"I lost $30,000 by basically getting a job after I quit my school and every single paycheck, which was at least $1,000 in the beginning but later became over $2,000 each month, all that money I would put into my business or to business-related stuff.
"Four years wasted, thousands of dollars wasted. And it's all time that I can't get back, it's all money that I can't get back," she said.
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