P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute. Actually I think there are a few thousand suckers born every minute thanks to modern technology and the Internet.

A few days ago I received a slick mailer for a MLM program called “MoneywayZ” and it intrigued me because it said absolutely nothing about how you could make money with their program, only that you could make a lot of money doing it.

So I decided to search about on the Internet to see if I could find anything out about this program; much to my surprise I wasn’t able to easily find anything out about this MLM scheme. I found a lot of links to other people who were promoting it, and I found a lot of very similarly written come-ons posted to various newsgroups, but I didn’t find one person saying it was the “real deal” or calling it out as a scam. I thought that was very odd.

In searching for this particular program I ran across a myriad of other MLM program web sites out on the Internet. The thing that struck me most about almost every MLM program out there is that it promotes itself as requiring no selling whatsoever. Almost each and every program I looked at insisted that once I enrolled in their program the system would just start working for me and start generating income while I slept!

And no program I looked at save one mentioned anything about how exactly all of this money (with no selling required) was to be generated. The one lone MLM program I saw was upfront about it’s scheme; as a prospect you buy in for almost $4,000 and then you are in their system. When (or if) someone else signs up using your code and pays their almost-four-thousand-dollar fee to join the MLM program you receive a huge commission.

Sounds great, except I couldn’t actually find any other products or services being sold. So it sounded like a very elaborate pyramid scheme to me. I’m sure the program does just enough to be legitimate and keeps itself just the right side of legal.

I think it’s for this very reason I’m so turned off by the concept of multi-level-marketing programs. They have all abandoned the idea of requiring you to have (or learn) some sales and marketing skills, and they all scream, “NO SELLING REQUIRED” in a huge, bold font on their web sites. The focus is now so much on recruiting and driving your “lines” that all pretense of selling and marketing has been swept under the rug.

I know most people are intimidated by the thought of “selling” but I think that this is a disservice to people because they will otherwise have to “sell” at some point when they join a MLM program. If they never sell they’ll end up getting out what they put in to the program – which is just about nothing – and they’ll wonder why they failed.

Where is the market for an honest MLM program? There has to be a large audience willing to join a program that is upfront and says, “Yeah, you have to sell and market yourself and this program to be successful.”

Maybe such a program is out there, but it’s being masked by all of the MLM programs that leave me feeling dirty when I read their come-on pitch.