| |
Amway
pushed and pushed hard, we were forced into bankruptcy.
At a point when we were losing everything, our sponsor
attempted to get us to sign an agreement to never speak
of my experience in exchange for the release of nearly
$20,000 in income that
Amway
had held “in escrow.” At the same time, Amway
strongly encouraged me to “sell my business”
for almost $75,000.
It appears what they both wanted was not
my business but my silence.
Neither our silence nor or character were for sale and
we left our home, the only one our children had ever
known.
I spent thousands of hours in research, documenting
the fraud and unfortunately, it goes all the way to
founder Rich DeVos
and some of his family, whom I had held in such high
regard. To my shock, I learned that Amway
senior management and ownership had been fully
aware of the fraud and exactly what was going to be
done to my family as early as the 1980’s.
An internal document, from then Business
Conducts Manager Ed Postma
to now Amway Indonesia
President Patric Sullivan
reveals that Amway
investigated the
tools system and determined it to be “illegal”
and found that there was concern over “mind control”
from tactics utilized upon distributors.
The internal document, on Amway
stationary, dated January
19, 1983, can be viewed
here:
|
|
Click On PDF Icon To Download The Postma Memo...The
Smoking Gun!!
|
Rich
DeVos, in about 1982,
described the tool business as “an illegal business”...here
it is in his own voice:
|
|
Click On MP3 Icon To Hear Rich DeVos Admit He
Knows About The Fraud!!
|
The
external and internal documentation begin to pile up.
I culled over 1,000
hours of legally recorded tapes, near 100 hours of video
and banker boxes of related documentation
that inconvertibly
define twenty years of what appears to be the largest
consumer fraud in history.
Professor G. Robert
Blakey was as an expert
witness in a case as he is the nation’s
foremost expert in organized crime.
Professor Blakey’s extensive legislative drafting
experience resulted in the passage of the Crime
Control Act of 1973, the Omnibus Crime Control Act of
1970 and the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, Title
IX of which is known as "RICO".
Professor Blakey literally wrote the RICO laws that
broke up the Mafia in the United States in the early
1970’s. He did an extensive analysis of Amway
and drew this independent conclusion:
"It is my
opinion that the Amway business is run in a manner that
is parallel to that of major organized crime groups,
in particular the Mafia. The structure and function
of major organized crime groups, generally consisting
of associated enterprises engaging in patterns of legal
and illegal activity, was the prototype forming the
basis for federal and state racketeering legislation
that I have been involved in drafting. The same structure
and function, with associated enterprises engaging in
patterns of legal and illegal activity, is found in
the Amway business."
His entire report is incredibly detailed and can be
viewed here:
|
|
Click On PDF Icon To Download The Blakey Report...Amway
Is Compared To Mafia!!
|
The
paper work from the countless lawsuits filed against
Amway, Rich DeVos
and Kingpin level distributors
would most likely fill several office buildings. Despite
having full knowledge of the ongoing fraud, Rich
DeVos wrote the book Compassionate
Capitalism: People Helping People Help Themselves.
The sick irony is that this is neither
compassionate nor capitalism. It
is a fraud. DeVos promotes
the rags to riches stories of the very Kingpin distributors
he knows are defrauding the public (and have been named
with him as co-defendants in multiple fraud lawsuits.)
My first hand experience was in building the
Amway
business globally. Our organization was used to recruit
over 1,000 people
into Amway. Of
those induced to participate, approximately 99% did
so at a financial net loss in the Harteis/Yager Amway
business. There were bankruptcies,
lost homes and some distributors were left tens of thousands
of dollars in the hole. See Case
Study Fred Harteis section
for specific testimonials. What was most disheartening
to learn was that Amway
knew in the early 1980s
that almost 100%
of those recruited into the Amway
business would LOSE
money.
I learned of a man named Bruce
Craig. He served as the
Assistant Attorney General of the state of Wisconsin
for 30 years until his retirement in 1997, at which
point he went into private practice. While acting as
the Assistant Attorney General, he prosecuted pyramid
cases, including what he describes as “extensive
litigation” against Amway
in the early 1980’s for income
misrepresentations. In
the discovery process of this litigation, distributors
tax returns revealed that the top 1% of Amway distributors
in his state (Direct distributors) had net annual incomes
of “minus $900.”
The system and its related costs have grown dramatically
since then. The income figures could actually be worse
now.
Here Rich DeVos,
in his own words, talking about an out and out “illegal
pyramid” and several other specific examples of
financial abuses…
|
|
Click On MP3 Icon To Hear Rich DeVos Talk About
Illegal Pyramid Activities!!
|
Second generation DeVos’s now
run Amway in a manner
near identical to their father. Despite knowing that
the distributor force is being recruited through deception
and then often bilked out of their life savings, Dick
DeVos made this taped representation to a large
crowd of trusting distributors.
“That’s what
we want to talk about tonight. Because I am pleased
to be able to tell you that, once again, for the thirty-eighth
straight year, the Amway business opportunity is the
best business opportunity in the whole world, bar none.
I don’t say that with arrogance, I say that simply
because it is true. And we work each and every day in
Ada to keep it true.”
- Dick DeVos, Alticor
President
As I began to interact with experts in the area of consumer
fraud, several critical issues were made clear to me.
First, the Federal Trade
Commission requires that the majority
of products going through a multi-level marketing company
be sold to an end consumer (a non distributor) to not
be considered an illegal pyramid. This is referred
to as the retail sales
rule. This was yet another surprise as the business
we were taught to build consisted almost entirely
of self consumption. This
type of operation of business, per the Federal Trade
Commission, is an illegal pyramid.
It goes further than that. The
tools business of books, tapes, CD’s and videos
is also an illegal pyramid per the FTC as it is a closed
system and no
product is ever
sold at retail to an end user/consumer outside of the
group. Consumers
have been unknowingly recruited to become involved in
not one but two illegal pyramids as they enter Amway.
Almost 100% of those
induced to participate have lost money as the FTC
regulations set up to protect from the abuses of illegal
pyramiding have been wholly
ignored by Amway.
An April 26, 1998 report in the Baton
Rouge Advocate revealed that:
“The FTC decision
noted, for example, that one of Amway's rules "provides
that distributors may not receive a performance bonus
unless they prove a sale to each of 10 different retail
customers during each month. But Amway Corp. executives
and several distributors who were interviewed admit
that rule is neither monitored nor enforced.”
“Larry Harper,
a senior manager of Amway Corp.'s distributor relations
section, also acknowledged bonus checks get paid to
distributors who have no retail sales. When asked if
a distributor can get a bonus check without having any
retail sales, Harper responded: "Yes you can."”
Documentation reveals that Amway
senior management and ownership has
known of this violation of FTC guidelines for two decades.
In addition, they have known about the fraud
of the tools business for just as long and have
had their attorneys work
to actively conceal it from the unknowing distributors.
Andy Andrews, a Diamond
who spoke out against the
abuses of the tools business was directed by
an Amway attorney
to assure the majority
of distributors never learn about the secretive tool
income. He advised that the Amway
attorney, discussing the secretive tools income,
told him:
“
98% of the IBO’s were not to participate in the
income nor were they even to know there was even an
opportunity.”
Here it is in his own voice:
|
|
Click On MP3 Icon To Hear Amway Diamond Andy
Andrews Share Shocking Evidence From Amway's Attorneys
About Secret Tool Income!
|
I completed my research and Merchants
of Deception, the highly detailed account of
the twenty year document trail of fraud and our terrifying
exodus from it. This book is what launched the current
FBI investigation involving the bureau and US
Assistant attorney Wayne Samuelson. In one of
a large number of meetings with the FBI, cancelled checks
made out to my sponsor, Harteis
and Yager and/or their business entities are
collected. I am also asked to fly to another state to
provide Merchants of
Deception to an agent of the Criminal
Investigation division of the IRS. Merchants
of Deception is also what launched the NBC
year long investigation and undercover expose where
they filmed the fraud first hand. Their crack undercover
team was exposed to the exact
deceptions exposed in the book. The book is currently
being utilized as a resource by governments and/or counter
cult organizations in multiple foreign countries.
Download your free copy now!
|
The book
is in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format and is 100%
compatible with both Macintosh and PC computers.
You
will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the
book.You can download a copy of Acrobat
Reader FREE at www.adobe.com.
Download Now!
Click
Here
|
|
 |
|
