Here’s a comment left by a reader who got the classic scam treatment to sign up to the Amway cult.
Thank you for your post, and I am very sad that I did not see this sooner. I was introduced to Amway and WWDB (World Wide Dream Builders) by a guy at my last job. I had just graduated college, and was pressured to get a job quickly.
The place where I met my "Mentor's Disciple," because he refused to actually be my mentor was a call center. He said, he was not in a position to be an effective mentor for me and that his mentor would be the person I would truly learn from. That's awfully strange considering you are the one talking to me about this business, but it did trick me into thinking he was looking out for my best interest.
Needless to say, I went to his house meeting, and a meeting at a church where I was told a lot of nonsense, and after the first meeting at the church from the "Diamond" I said this guy is illiterate and I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. The "Mentor's Disciple" said maybe you didn't click with him, but someone else will hopefully make more sense to you.
So they sent me to a 3 day meeting over 6 hours in travel time combined to come to these seminars called Freedom something where I heard from 15 different diamonds, and still had no idea what the business was. All they did was show videos of their expensive life styles and tell people don't listen to your friends, family, or any other naysayer because they will never understand.
Finally,I told my real mentor after asking ten times if you don't show me some numbers, I will never sign up. He then showed me how I have to spend money on the dvd's, the membership, and the expensive trips out of state to go to these meetings. It would've cost me close to 10k that year with the products and I wouldn't have sold anything.
I was so frustrated with this, and when I confronted him he basically taught me how to divert parts of my paycheck to cover these expenses...What a joke, the guy had been in this business for 2 years, and was an Island's Manager (Basically the same price point as a TGI Friday's). This guy was getting nowhere fast and he only had 6 "followers" at this point.
With all of this said, and it is probably very difficult to follow due to my erratic thought process,I gave it a legitimate chance.This is why I can fairly say there is no gold at the end of this rainbow. I am very glad that I only wasted a small portion of my life to learn a valuable lesson, and they got me at one of my most desperate times. I was getting married soon, with no job security, and trying to have a kid. These people aren't just greedy they are inhumane to hunt out people that were in positions like mine.