In August of 2026 a website called “Writethepromise.org” was launched. The website discusses a proposed law called “The Direct Selling Clarity Act” which, it asserts, will put direct sellers who make earnings claims on “equal footing” with franchise owners, realtors and insurance agents. The bill would supposedly draw a clear legal line between direct selling and illegal … Read more
This post is about “Critical Perspectives on Multilevel Marketing: An Introduction to the Field of Critical MLM Studies,” a book that has just been published by Edward Elgar, a large, international academic publisher. Full disclosure: I am very excited and honored to be one of the contributors to this volume. The subtitle is important: the editors of … Read more
Today’s blog was written by Dr. Claudia Groß, of the TIAS School for Business & Society, The Netherlands, www.tias.edu/ Dr. Groß has written a summary of the article she and Professor William Keep, of the College of New Jersey Business School, which was published in the Journal of Marketing Management in 2025. A link to … Read more
In Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010), Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway detail how scientists were recruited to sow doubt about the problems caused by different industries, including the links between tobacco smoking and cancer, and the links between fossil fuels and global warming. The book tracks how money was channeled from the tobacco and fossil fuel industries to … Read more
Multilevel Marketing (MLM) portrays itself as a business that anyone can do, with low barriers to entry and no experience necessary.[1] However, the contracts that MLM distributors are required to sign paint a different picture. MLM distributor agreements are similar to franchise agreements; they are lengthy, complex, sophisticated commercial instruments. Like franchise agreements, MLM distributor … Read more
The latest House appropriations bill, H.R. 4664, includes a provision designed to starve the Federal Trade Commission of the funds necessary to effectively regulate the multilevel marketing industry. Section 531 of this massive bill provides that “[n]one of the funds in this Act may be used to finalize or enforce the “Trade Regulation on the … Read more
The Federal Trade Commission has just scored a convincing victory over the MLM “Success by Health” and its founder, serial MLM fraudster James D. Noland, Jr., as well as several other Success by Health officers and related entities. After an 11-day bench trial, Judge Dominic Lanza issued an injunction barring Noland and the other defendants … Read more
When I hear about a case where one MLM is suing another MLM, my first thought is “Is there some way they can both lose?” Usually such cases involve one MLM poaching distributors from another, distributors being the most valuable commodity owned by any MLM. But this case is a little bit different. Here are … Read more
I thought it would be appropriate to start off this blog with a post acknowledging the passing of one of the most dedicated advocates for victims of MLM-style pyramid schemes – Bruce Craig. Some readers may remember Bruce from his appearances at the MLM conferences in 2021 and 2022 (https://www.mlmconference.com/video). Bruce was born in Chicago … Read more