Posted
12:03 PM
by Scoobie Davis
Another Victory Against Amway/Quixtar/Alticor At the beginning of the year,
I wrote about how the blogger Google bomb against Amway/Quixtar/Alticor had been a huge success in terms of educating people who were considering investing in this scam.
In the past several months, I noticed that a lot of traffic has gone to the post based on quite a number of keyword searches (e.g. the post is ranked high for a search of "Dexter Yager"--
Yager is one of the
Amway kingpin tools scammers). What is great is that over 95 percent of the hits are from either red states or third world nations.
Why third world nations? Because Amway has reached the saturation point in the US and the areas of growth are places in which people haven't heard of them and
their shady business practices. Why the red states? The simple fact is that Democrats and progressives are not generally susceptible to the Amway scam--it is a con that is directed at Republicans/conservatives. If the typical progressive were to attend an Amway rally and be exposed to
their theocratic/right-wing propaganda, he/she would make a hasty exit (also
read Eric Scheibeler's free online book Merchants of Deception for more examples). The kind of people who get scammed by Amway are the same types of people who were conned by Jerry Falwell's phony videotapes (
click here and
here) claiming that Bill and Hillary were bumping off anyone who got in their way.
That's the power of the Internet: it allows people to better weigh their options--something that should lead to a huge decline in business for Amway.
UPDATE: (via
The IBO Rebellion)
A hilarious undercover video of an Amway IBO prospecting.
UPDATE II: I've received some inquiries about the attention I've been bringing to Amway/Quixtar. The general tone is: what's the big deal about Amway? For one thing, it is one of the most reactionary businesses out there. The Amway founding families, the DeVos and Van Andel families, have a stingy compensation plan for their distributors but their purse strings aren't tight when it comes to funding wing-nut causes such as
creationism,
dominionism, and the
scary Council for National Policy.
Many of the kingpin distributors are just as reactionary as the main corporation. Listen to these clips of kingpin distributor Dexter Yager (
click here and
here). Yager and other are using their ill-gained wealth
to undermine the U.S. political system (also
here).
However, the most important thing about the work that bloggers have done is to help inform prospective Amway distributors about the perils of joining the
organization. That's what is so great about the internet is that information is anathema to mind-control cults like Amway. When I and other bloggers manipulated the search engine results to allow for more critical sites to appear for keyword searches of "Amway" and "Quixtar," it better allows these potential recruits to reason and to ask tough questions of the people who want to sponsor them. As former Moonie
Steven Hassan has pointed out, cults thrive when the control of information is in their favor. We helped to even the playing field.
What exploitive cults like Amway do to their recruits is unseemly. They sell their victims--often young couples who want nothing more than a better life--a bill of goods, front-load them
with over-priced "tools," and when they fail, blame them for their victimization (blaming the victim
is a hallmark of most cults).
This isn't just about politics; it's about freeing people from the tentacles of nightmare organizations like Amway.