Here’s a reader who tells us nothing much has changed in Amway in the past 20 years. Except the tapes ambots have to buy on the tool scam are now CD’s. The story is the same as many people who’ve got taken in by the Amway scam. A couple looking to make a better life, have extra money, have the wife be a stay at home mother. Dream Night = nightmare. 40 people crammed into a hotel room at an Amway function. No sleep. Love bombing. Having words like quitter and loser ingrained into their heads from the assholes in their Amway upline. Fear of being ostracized keeping them in the Amway cult. Figuring out Amway is a losing business opportunity. Stockpiling Amway products. Savings gone. Credit cards maxed. Fighting all the time. Being financially set back several years trying to recover from the Amway scam. How many times has this story been told? Get involved in Amway and step into hell.
Every now and then I get an urge to look up the latest info on the Scamway world. So this time I landed on your blog and I’m glad I did.
My wife of twenty five years and I were coaxed onto the soap slickened slopes of Mt Scamway back in the early 90’s after we were first married. We were a couple of wide eyed 23 yr olds who wanted simply to help ourselves financially by making that extra few hundred bucks a month and buy products we were already using from ourselves. Sound familiar?
Our sponsor was a guy I went to school with. It all seemed pretty good until we attended our first function, a Dream Night if I recall. Start of a fucking nightmare is what it was. We were newly married and as such didnt have a lot of money. We did have good credit however. So we paid for this with mostly credit, partly cash, all with the blessing of our upline direct. It was quite expensive even with like forty of us crammed in a room in Richmond. And we didnt sleep all damned weekend. And above all I was really uncomfortable with a lot of what was being said but tried to keep an “open mind”.
But I digress. After this I began dissecting facts and crunching numbers and realized in the back of my mind that this was a losing proposition. But I wanted to give it a fair shake and I’m not a quitter, and my bride whom I did and do love dearly, was all in. So we continued. For two long years and the birth of our first child. His birth caused us both to take a long look at how we were spending our resources and we finally had the clarity of mind to say fuck it.
The addiction for her was the people. You know the ones who hug you incessantly and tell you they love you? The ones who tell you how great you are, you’re a winner, and all that shit? I’m not really a touchy feely guy and wasn’t really into that but she was raised in a home where praise and encouragement came at a premium. Just another angle for the programmers to use. For me it was the desire to achieve success for me and my wife and honestly, I wanted her to be proud of me like those gals up on stage were proud of their hardworking hubbies. (Even tho I hear a whole bunch of them were having fun on the side and are now no longer wed).
I have to this day no real idea how much we lost on that whole damned mess. I know it took a huge toll on our married life because of the bills we racked up in pursuit of “The Dream”. By the time we escaped and deprogrammed we were flat broke, the cards were maxxed, the savings were gone, and we were constantly at each others throats over everything, but the fights always started about money, or rather the lack of it. And there was enough fucking LOC in our closet to float a battleship. Rather than helping us, the Ama-Scam set us back a good five years financially.
Today I would never fall for it, but as a young and gullible man I was sucked right in. And I actually tried. I went out and met people. You know, “cold contacting” and setting up “QI’s” and the whole damn tamale. Went to the meetings, CONventions, and slept 3-4 hours a nite. And never made enough to cover the gas and the fucking food, let alone hotel rooms. Looking back it was like escaping from a booby hatch. After probly a year of no Scamway influence, no tapes in our car tape deck,(no they weren’t friggin CD’s they werent invented yet) and telling every upline Ambot who called to apply pressure to have an arsenic and LOC cocktail, we were free. We are now approaching our Silver-no longer in Scamway-Thank You Lord Anniversary. Carry on your good work, Anna Banana.