Amway is another example. It has established close ties to the US government to help ensure its survival, even though it is another parasitic multilevel marketing pyramid scam.

Like biological parasites, the long lasting ones seem to have optimized the level of damage and chaos they cause, along with maintaining protection mechanisms (lobbying, political donations, corruption) that enable them to continue to survive and be incredibly lucrative to their founders.

Amway is huge in China. Anytime I got approached in coffee shops it was 50/50 someone wanting to practice English, or an Amway rep.

In the UK Amway's legal settlement requires them to publish the compensation tiers and how many people are in each tier. So you can see at a glance that almost everybody involved gets nothing.

It doesn't stop people joining, unfortunately. Knowing that Sue, the really successful seeming Super Global Ambassador Tier leader at the presentation on Saturday earned less than a shelf stacker does not stop some people figuring if only they join Amway they'd be doing better.

It's a continuum: Ponzi -> Illegal MLM -> Legal MLM -> For-Profit Corporation.

In Ponzis and Illegal MLMs, there's either no product or a sham product to disguise money from new recruits paying off the lineage.

Legal MLMs are legal because there's a more legitimate product that accounts for a larger share of revenue.

But even for-profit corporations that need to grow to survive share some features with the illegal variety, it's just that the real value of their products is a larger portion of their total revenue.

This is true however a large percentage of the US population refuses to have anything to do with them. I'm in Manila for work a lot, and the number of MLM scams and the percentage of people sharing them and recruiting on facebook is unnervingly high.