Multi-level marketing fun

Multi-level marketing is a system where people sign up others to sell products for them, taking a percentage profit; those others then recruit yet others, and so on. In most cases, most of the actual money moving around is membership fees and training materials. Basically, it's a pyramid scam. The people at the top make a fortune, and MLM schemes are notoriously difficult for the state to regulate; they tend to sail just this side of legal.

Occasionally, you'll see mild examples in the wacky world of website momentisation; multi-level referral selling schemes. These are somewhat different in that the sponsoring company is making its money out of sales; third parties, however, often make a lot selling useless training material to the get-rich-quick market. You even see this happening with single-layer advertising and referral systems like Google AdSense and Amazon Associates.

I was thinking of this now, because it just occurred to me that someone tried to induct me into one in college. Something to do with selling a telecoms product; cheap long-distance calling or similar. I'd forgotten all about it, and I just realised what he was up to. He was one of these eternal first-years who finally dropped out the year after I started; he was about 25 at the time. I wonder what happened to him.

Always shocking that seemingly intelligent people can be taken in by this crap. I'd never met another one before or since, but apparently well over a million individuals in the US alone are involved in at least one such scheme.

So, surely one of my hundreds of lovely if generally slightly odd readers has been drawn into something like this, or the attempt made to recruit them? Stories?