The cases in that article are MILD compared to some that I saw in the extremely short time I worked with a certain guru I won't mention here (though he's in the article). After quitting my own day job, training various assistants, and teaching my mom to make money on her blog, I thought it might be kind of fun to show more people how to make a little extra income...and to get a closer look at how one of those companies operates.
$100k-200k in products purchased was not at all uncommon, and some of the people didn't even know how to save an Excel file or locate something they had saved on their computers. They needed community college computer classes, not "make money online" products. The vast majority had never put any of the methods into practice (for obvious reasons), even though *some* of the courses did have content that wasn't totally outdated and useless. On one hand, I wanted to write them all off, thinking, "A fool and his money..." Realistically, though, the despicable nature of how they were doing business outweighed my belief that every responsible adult should have a better-tuned BS detector than what the customers were demonstrating.
-Testimonials, in some cases, came from employees/contractors of the company itself. Others were just traded among product owners. I remember at the very end, sitting there watching product owners coach each other on what to say about their products as they filmed testimonial videos. Some offered cash to students to do the same (or discounts on products, in a lot of cases). I kind of wish I had been recording what was going on.
-Cross-promotions (perhaps a bigger income stream than their own courses) were marketed with 100% lies in a lot of cases. They told me and a few other people how they made $600k in an evening from one promotional email about a $2000 product. They did that with a video talking about how they used that "essential tool" to make thousands, blah blah...but of course, they had never actually used it. They thought that part was pretty funny.
-Struggling "students" - You'd think they'd have the decency to be honest with someone after they had blown $50k with them, but instead of telling people that maybe it just wasn't going to happen for them, or that maybe they should just work with the tools they already have instead of constantly buying more...they would chastise them for "letting go of the dream", not having the right tools (STILL), or "not working hard enough/long enough". Somehow, the advice always involved spending more - even if they were sick, in debt, pulling from their kid's college fund, etc.
I don't know how many people I told to give it up on the short time before I quit, but for the most part, they were too deeply brainwashed to listen to common sense. They would come back at me with stories of how so-and-so looked like a failure for SOOOO long until he finally hit it big. They didn't want to hear that (a) the story was a lie, or (b) the person in the story had a lot more skills/innate intelligence/drive/work ethic...
In truth, I don't know if it's really any worse than a lot of other "investments" people take on. College is getting to be a pretty bad financial investment these days, especially third-tier private colleges + unmarketable majors. Yet, we've created a system where people will do obscene things to get that education because everyone seems to think you MUST have a degree.
Franchising, while profitable for some, is often little more than a money grab from the owners who lock people into horrible, abusive contracts and get them to invest their life savings in businesses where even the best locations rarely get a better return than a simple index fund over the long-haul - and franchises are much riskier and involve a lot more work. Most of them have teams specifically designed to sell people on the concept and help them figure out ways to get the funds (though, being a more established industry, they have significantly more rules than IM).
Then there's the general "American Dream", which is perhaps the biggest scam of all, given that it leaves most people deeply in debt and working constantly to service that debt and maintain their lifestyle while making someone else richer...and most of them won't even realize it until they look back with regret 50 years down the road, realizing they should have spent more time on the things that actually mattered to them. You can't replace time.
The effort to expose the gurus is admirable and it's definitely a huge irritation that so many people associate online marketing with that stuff - but it's just treating a symptom. Some people seem to go through life just looking for someone else to tell them what to do and take everything they have. There will always be people who fall into bad situations and let their hope outweigh their common sense. I have to wonder if targeting that way of thinking would be more effective than constantly battling the people in line to take advantage of it.
