Once again I see a fresh wave of new-ish members of forums, even this one, making many short posts in order to have their signature files displayed as much as possible to promote their illegal cash-gifting programs. (This is one of the few forums they come to specifically for this purpose, because many other forums are now blocking them and deleting their posts in order to protect themselves against the allegation that they're aiding the promulgation of this illegality. I have myself seen conversations elsewhere in which such people recommend this forum to each other expressly for the purpose because, very distressingly, it's perceived as a "soft touch" for promoting such criminal activities in this way.)
I think the current economic downturn and uncertainty is going to attract large numbers of people into this sort of illegal "opportunity". Those of us making a living in Network Marketing should particularly be on our guard and speak out about them. Saying nothing is not, on any level, the right thing to do. Ours is also the business model that gets seriously damaged in the long term by the way these criminal programs market themselves.
I thought it might be useful to WAHM members to point out a few things and provide some helpful links on this subject.
1. Some of these criminal enterprises dress themselves up as "multi-level marketing", but if there's no genuine product (and in many cases there isn't even a pretence of one)
they are rightly illegal. In the US, Canada and all of Europe anyway - and I'm pretty confidently guessing in other countries, too.
2. Their promoters invariably say things like "There's nothing illegal about cash gifting" and challenge critics to point to the specific item of statutory law, which varies from country to country of course, saying that gifting is illegal. It isn't always statutory law - it's sometimes case law. The reality is that they are trying to con us, and sometimes to fool us by quoting tax regulations which are entirely irrelevant. Gifting itself is not illegal, but
soliciting a cash gift from a recipient whose intention at the time of the "gift" is to become apparently entitled to make profits by soliciting cash gifts in turn from third parties IS illegal. Don't get sucked in by the lure of "easy money". People go to prison for this. Don't be one of them. Don't assume "eew, well, that's just other people, not me".
3. Members living in the US may be interested to see
this page on the FTC's own website warning about the illegality of these "opportunities".
4. In a recent discussion here, Robin kindly shared
this link from the North Carolina Department of Justice. (This particular one was shared simply because one of the people who apparently didn't understand why cash gifting programs are such a big deal happened to be from North Carolina, but information like this is widely available online from just about every state in the U.S. and most countries around the world. This just happens to be a nice concise one, explaining the illegality unambiguously.)
5. I have no idea how "official" this site is (I suspect not very), or to whom it belongs, but if anyone's interested, I've recently come across the
"Cash Gifting Watchdog".
Lastly, please excuse me for making very similar posts in the Network Marketing folder as well as here in Business Advice, but these are inevitably the two WAHM forum folders in which people habitually try to promote these crimes.