MLM Scam / Traditional Chinese Translation

November 28, 2007 12:18 AM

Readers of traditional Chinese: Does this scan of an article imply that the company being discussed is a MLM scam? Does it adequately address the concerns outlined in these Malaysian posts?

I'm looking for an authoritative article about this company's behavior, and little smatterings from blogs won't be enough to persuade a friend about how the company actually makes money.

posted by sleslie to Work & Money (3 answers total)

Best answer: I'm a simplified kind of guy myself, but I can read traditional with a little work!

The article isn't exactly authoritative, but it does imply that the Lampe Berger company is an MLM scan - the big "層壓式傳銷"(层压式传销) in the headline means "pyramid/multi-level marketing". The first paragraph talks about a similar MLM company, 美之會, that was investigated by police earlier in the year for MLM activites, leading to arrests. The bulk of the article is about a guy who gets invited by an old classmate to come to an Lampe Berger info meeting, where he gets pitched the typical MLM scheme - pay some money to join in, sell products, recruit your friends, etc. He ends up not doing it, but fears his classmate is getting scammed. The little infobox in the lower-left just compares the two companies(美之會 and Lampe Berger).

You may find the articles linked to on this page useful, or just do a search for 亮碧思集团

Although this is kind of unrelated, I've had a friend get involved in MLM stuff (Quixtar), and there was no reasoning with him. He'd been roped in by a relative who was doing fairly well, and was basically dead-set on making this his business. He was so sure he was going to be making millions off of this stuff. So, yeah, good luck with your friend.
posted by pravit at 12:57 AM on November 28, 2007

Response by poster: Regarding the unrelated part... yeah, that's a whole different askme post. All I can do for now is wonder how someone can live with doing this sort of thing to people.

Thanks.
posted by sleslie at 3:52 AM on November 28, 2007

A bit background about where the scanned article is from: the magazine is a very popular weekly in Hong Kong, (its name is literally 'one-week-magazine'), it's a bit of a tabloid, but still reliable in such matters.
posted by of strange foe at 11:51 AM on November 28, 2007