MonaVie Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Let’s Fight Autism Together!

July 6, 2017 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

Last week, I wrote about donating some money to help homeless women and children. Even though it was a small amount of money, it felt good.

Today, I’d like to ask you to join me in helping me raise some money for autism.

I know, you have all your charity money planned for. I’m the same way. This is the rare exception, where I’m changing my plans and allocating some more money.

The Story Behind the Cause

tired runner — Look at Lauren. Can’t you spare a little cash for charity?

Sometime in 2016, I got sued by Le-vel for my Thrive Review. My review was harsh, but Truth in Advertising’s were worse in my opinion the first one and the follow up. Anyway, Truth in Advertising has high-powered lawyers and I’m just your average private citizen.

When I spread the news about Le-Vel’s harassment, Lauren Sprouse reached out to me to help. It was amazing because I had tried to find a first amendment lawyer in Texas and everyone wanted tens of thousands up front. With her help and the firm she worked for MZF Law Firm, we were able to beat Le-Vel. The internet can now not only read my review, but hundreds of others in the comments.

Lauren reached out to me a couple of weeks ago. She’s planning to run the London Marathon as part of the Run for Autism team. This was around the time when London terrorist attacks were still fresh in everyone’s mind. And Boston Marathon terrorist attacks will always be on my mind. Finally, I first started writing about MLM in part because salespeople were making ridiculous unsubstantiated claims such as MonaVie cures autism. I had a long back and forth with a parent in those comments and his argument amounted to, “I have to try everything.” (That parent was one of the few people to come back to the blog and say how silly his argument was.)

It’s hard to not feel for people in that position. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’m fortunate enough to not be in that position. MonaVie did a billion in sales and when the pyramid imploded was foreclosed upon for only $15 million. If only we could have aimed that billion dollars directly at autism. Surely that would do a lot of good, right?

The past is in the past. We probably can’t raise a billion dollars anyway. However, together we can do something small that may really help fight autism in a way that MonaVie couldn’t.

Lauren has set up a donation page here.

To encourage you to give whatever you can, I’ll match the first $250 that comes in. Just leave a comment here of how much you donated and your name. Trust me, giving will feel good.

Everyone’s Voice Had Been Silenced! (Including Mine!)

September 20, 2017 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

[This post was literally 6 months in the making. Thanks to recent events and the timely Blog Action Day‘s focus on Raising Your Voice, it was time to finish it and get it published. The dreams that I mention below 100% happened… they are not a literally device.]

It was a few days past the Ides of April (2015), which for me was day three of recovering from a stomach bug. I was feeling good and even eating almost regular meals. Everything was getting back to normal except for the dreams.

It started with:

I had a dream that @Beck to came to my house to jam a bit. In other (not-so) news, I have weird dreams when I'm sick.
— LazyManAndMoney (@LazyManAndMoney) April 14, 2015

Even in dreams Beck is really, really cool. Unfortunately, Twitter didn’t give me the space to mention how Beck windsurfed into my driveway on wheels.

The next day I had a fantastic science fiction dream about how aliens created life on earth and only a select few knew about it. If I was a fiction writer, it could have been the next Frankenstein. Then I remembered listening to talk radio about Scientology earlier in the morning. Suddenly that dream made a lot more sense than the Beck one.

[Fast-forward to April 16th…]

I just woke up from the third dream and I’m typing as fast as I can remember it. I know it’s important. I’m going to chalk up the part of Gronk paddling me and some unidentifiable friend in a small boat to me wearing my Do You Job Patriots jersey that day. (This isn’t the important part.)

There is some sort of pizza celebration going on in the city. Everyone had reason to be excited. However, when they opened their mouths, they found they couldn’t speak.

The mayor’s voice… silenced. The pizza shop owner getting inducted to the Pizza Hall of Fame… silenced.

It was exactly the plot of the Emmy Award-nominated Hush episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but without the creepy Gentleman to give you nightmares for weeks.

People with important things to say should be heard. They should not have their voices silenced.

Instead of listening to these important things, we are focused on what Kim Kardashian had for lunch or whether a damn dress is blue. (It would be fair to question the importance of announcing a pizza celebration. Cut me a little slack, it was a dream that I had after a stomach bug where I couldn’t eat. “Importance” is relative.)

I’m typing like mad because I realize it this was just like the Scientology dream above. It was based in reality.

[Returning to October 16th…]

The reality is that I live in world where people are ROUTINELY silenced. It’s not China or North Korea, it’s the world of people who try to inform the public about pyramid schemes that call themselves multi-level marketing.

I first noticed MLM sites and articles disappearing around 2010. One of the popular websites that exposed MonaVie’s scheme was called Purple Horror. One day all the content was erased and it was suddenly a website supporting MonaVie. Of course, MonaVie also tried to silence me by claiming that I couldn’t use their trademark in my website’s metadata. It was even covered by the consumerist. Fortunately it was unsuccessful and MonaVie was foreclosed upon.

In another case, Vemma had silenced a website called YPR Pariah. All the useful content was erased and was instead replaced with a lawyer-speak statement of, “Any disputes or misunderstandings between the publishers or authors of this blog and Vemma Nutrition Company have been resolved to the satisfaction of all involved.”

Truth in Advertising covered the silencing of YPR Pariah here.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending: The FTC shut down Vemma a few months ago.

Other schemes have silenced critics and still remain active. I’ve covered Nerium who seems to have silenced extensive work by Bare Faced Truth.

Finally, there’s my voice. I can still write about many MLM schemes. There is one that I can’t. So instead I’ll simply point you to my statement on LifeVantage.

Now where was that mayor? If I can’t use my mouth to speak my mind, I might as well use it to eat some pizza.

You are Easily Fooled!

October 13, 2015 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, I came across my favorite article of the year:

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s How.

This article should be required reading by every student… every year. Non-students should be required to read it too.

I’ll give you time to read it now. Got it? Good.

For the few people who still didn’t take the time to read it, it is exactly what the title says it is.

A journalist decided to see if he could fool millions of people with bunk science and he did. Here’s how:

1) He created a fake “institution” that sounded credible. He’s also a doctor, but not a medical doctor as most people assume when they think doctor.
2) He ran a clinical trial on a small number of people testing for a lot of different things… essentially throwing poop at the wall to see what sticks. Statistically a few things are always going to stick.
3) He found a bunch of journals that sounded professional. They are known to publish anything plausible with almost no questions as long as they are being paid.
4) He cooked up a juicy press releasing the “results.”
5) A bunch of magazines and news shows took the bait and rushed to highlight those great “results.”

I bet there are millions people who today think that eating chocolate helps you lose weight.

The takeaway from the journalist himself:

We journalists have to feed the daily news beast, and diet science is our horn of plenty. Readers just can’t get enough stories about the benefits of red wine or the dangers of fructose. Not only is it universally relevant — it pertains to decisions we all make at least three times a day — but it’s science! We don’t even have to leave home to do any reporting. We just dip our cups into the daily stream of scientific press releases flowing through our inboxes. Tack on a snappy stock photo and you’re done.

If there was a silver lining it was this: “… many readers were thoughtful and skeptical. In the online comments, they posed questions that the reporters should have asked.”

I’m often asked why I cover MLM scams so much. One of the reasons is that this kind of junk science is used to push the pyramid scheme and get people to pay so much more than they should. Here are a few examples:

MonaVie – The first time I encountered clear junk science was this “study.” It used 5 people and essentially concluded nothing helpful. It was also conducted by a doctor who was employed as MonaVie’s “Chief Science Officer.”
LifeVantage Protandim – I wish I could write about more about this… but this is why I can’t.
What I can say is that you should be very careful of ABC Primetime videos you see. For example, ABC Primetime covereda faith healer named John of God, and edited out James Randi’s clear explanations. It was a time in history when Primetime’s ratings were at an all-time low. It seems like mystery is a better story and delivers better ratings than throwing a wet blanket of truth on it.
Xocai – This company produced a study that would lead you to believe that their chocolate helps you lose weight. I’m not making this up. They had 50 people which is at least a little more. They gave them lifestyle intervention which included many things including financial rewards for people who lost the most weight. Of course they also gave them a high antioxidant chocolate drink. There was no control variable and the conclusion was that all the stuff together works.
Of course we already know that financial incentives help people lose weight. They could have added watching an episode of Seinfeld to the study and conclude that Seinfeld helps you lose weight too. Brainwashed Xocai people actually presented this to me as scientific proof that consumers should buy their chocolate.
Recently a law-firm contacted me about their class action lawsuit against Xocai. Their exposure of the pyramid scheme in the lawsuit (PDF) was amazing to read. I study MLMs and the lawsuit spends 50 pages on just the pyramid scheme aspect… not even getting to the junk science.
Nerium – As one commenter pointed out via Nerium’s study: “This will NEVER be published by a respectable journal it is so flawed. No P-value is listed. They don’t say what kind of blinded study it is and the bias is so obnoxious it is embarrassing. No self respecting company with ‘real science’ would ever put this out. Show me a triple blinded study with over 1,000 subjects in a multiple center design, with a P-value under .05%. Have the results measured with a cutometer or a corneometer. Then have it published in the JDD, the JAAD or any other reputable Dermatology Journal. Until then don’t believe any ‘study’ they put out.”
The company conducting the study claims that they “help build a strong, science-based, product portfolio”, which is exactly what it seems they did. The study was approved for publishing by someone who worked at the same place as one of Nerium’s employees and author of the study.

You can usually go through each of the MLMs and see the “doctor” (or Chief Science Officer) who is compensated handsomely to assert that the products “work.”

Ocean Spray doesn’t need a doctor to sell its juice like MonaVie. Hershey’s doesn’t need a doctor to sell it’s chocolate like Xocai.

Kudos to io9 for publishing this article and telling the story about how can be tricked. Now if only mainstream organizations would shine a light on some of the companies that are using the same tactics to trick consumers every day. Unfortunately, it takes a more work than just “dipping their cups into the daily stream of scientific press releases.”

MonaVie Mynt is Coming For Your Kids

April 13, 2014 by Lazy Man 74 Comments

As regular readers know, I find it interesting and amazing that multi-level marketing companies still exist to scam people in 2014. It’s been more than 25 years after Money Magazine called the scam a mess looking to take in the gullible. Regular readers also know that I learned about MLM from writing about MonaVie, when one of their distributors tried to get my wife to buy a $45 bottle of juice.

I’ve gone on to exposing quite a few of these companies and their fraud. A few years ago, I covered one called ViSalus that was getting press in that community for growing quickly (today the pyramid has imploded and they are a quarter of what they were). ViSalus was a little different than other MLMs I had written about. They got a lot of young people, around ages 23-27 and they seemed to be the top marketers. ViSalus put out a a bunch of misleading information about their pyramid aimed at that young market.

With ViSalus’ implosion, it seemed like many of the brainwashed young distributors didn’t learn and jumped to Vemma’s Young People Revolution. Vemma had taken the attack to get your kids to another level in trying to brainwash them into believe they were part of some kind of “revolution.” In fact, it looks a lot more like the Young People Revolution is conning them into a pyramid scheme. I don’t see how it is any different than the FTC and even the FBI and Department of Justice investigating a similar MLM, HerbaLife, for recruiting people into a pyramid scheme.

I’ve noticed that Vemma seems to have taken things a step further and going to the college campuses. Maybe ViSalus did the same, but it didn’t seem as obvious to me. Nothing like convincing college kids with no income that they should be spending it on a $40 bottle of juice and/or a $75 case of 24 energy drinks.

However, this article isn’t about this ViSalus or Vemma. It’s about how MonaVie has decided to copy them to create their MonaVie Mynt program as a way to market to these young adults.

What is MonaVie Mynt

For a couple of weeks, MonaVie had a great page explaining MonaVie Mynt. They’ve since taken it down, but others on the internet have captured most of the important information. A simple Google search of this phrase shows:

“mynt™ is completely backed by MonaVie. It’s not a new company or a separate entity of MonaVie. It’s simply the brand name of MonaVie’s movement to attract those in the Gen C crowd and to create the next chapter in direct selling. mynt is a community of like-minded individuals who want to have fun!”

MonaVie further defines Gen C as the connected generation, those “who are constantly connected to family, friends, businesses, and interests through the latest technology” and primarily between the ages of 18-34.

So as you can see there’s really nothing of substance to mynt, it is just a bunch of marketing hype to group some people (Gen C) and segregate others (older generations). Here’s some of MonaVie’s brain-dead marketing from their blog:

“mynt is kind of like a Harley Davidson gang… but without bikes… and on Facebook.” — Stephen Jones, MonaVie senior director of marketing, North America

“mynt is like throwing a pebble in the water; one simple act can create a #movemynt.” — Calli Mott, MonaVie director of North America

“mynt is completely innovative. It will change everything. Again.” — Katy Holt-Larsen, VP of North America

“mynt is not ‘the next big wave.’ Waves crash. We’ve created a movemynt!” — Mauricio Bellora, MonaVie president and CEO

These marketing quotes tell you nothing about mynt, often using undefined terms like “movemynt” to try to explain the undefined term “mynt.”

It’s hard to call mynt noteworthy when it keeps everything the same including the compensation structure. While on the topic of that compensation plan (PDF), there is an income disclosure statement from 2011. I guess it would be too much work for MonaVie to make 2013’s numbers available… and I guess the same about the 2012 numbers. I’d see if they’d hire me, but it seems like they filled their quota of lazy… putting me to shame.

I should mention that mynt does have some new products. In particular they have two new kits of products. One kit costs $1050 and earns 600 PV (personal volume). Another kit costs $550, but only earns 250 PV (personal volume). Earning money is largely dependent on the PV of the people you recruit meaning that they are likely to push recruits to buy the $1050 kit to earn the 600 PV. After all, if you can recruit two people to buy that kit (1200 PV points) it is near the same as recruiting FIVE people who buy the $550 kit (1250 PV points). In fact, they even “bold” that buying the more expensive kit “Keeps you Active for 2 months!” This is a good time to remind that the FTC says MLMs with Required Minimum Purchases to Earn Commissions are Pyramid Schemes. Pushing this purchase as a way to stay in the business clearly is a red flag.

My analysis of the compensation plan above is purposely very simplistic, the compensation plan is so complex it would require more than a dozen blog posts to explain it. This complexity is another red flag of an illegal pyramid scheme.

The mynt products that MonaVie introduced themselves are the basic lotions and potions that are known throughout the industry. They have their protein shake, just like HerbaLife, ViSalus, Shakelee, One 24, Reliv, and a dozen other MLM companies. There’s a “Burn” product based on green tea that can be purchased very cheaply (especially as the healthy drink itself) elsewhere. Then there is the “Cleanse” product… scientifically a load of bovine excrement. There’s a “Build” product of amino acids… which you can get in your whey protein replacing the need for the shake product – killing two birds with one stone. Then there’s a “Pro-bio” probiotic product, which claims to help your digestive system… if you have digestive problems that might be something, but living a healthy life means you don’t need to improve blood sugar control and those with lactose digestion problems have a solution called Lactaid that is proven. Finally there’s the energy drink… similar to the what Vemma’s Verve that’s been pushed to their Young People’s Revolution.

At the end of the day, there’s really nothing to see here… certainly nothing close to spending a $1050 on. I would do a more in-depth analysis of the value of the kits, but MonaVie hasn’t given enough information to go on. For instance the expensive kit contains two bags of shake mix. How many pounds are in a bag? They don’t say, right now.

At the end of the day, mynt appears to be a pile of empty marketing, with even more red flags of it being an illegal pyramid scheme than before, and some horribly priced “me too” products that don’t even contain the juice the company was founded on. If this was a fiction novel, no publisher would take it because it simply is too unrealistic.

MonaVie Mynt has one thing going for them. They are focusing on young adults, who presumably haven’t been burned by MLMs/pyramid schemes previously. Most likely their friends haven’t had the experience of getting burned yet either. More and more it looks like MLM companies have churned through too many people and everyone who is not brainwashed knows it is a scam. It seems like they are admitting that their best plan is to brainwash them young before they know any better.

The MonaVie Mynt program is launching tomorrow. My bet is that Generation C will be connected and intelligent enough to say, “MonaVie, go stuff yourselves! We are smarter than to fall for your artificial hype and marketing gimmicks.” Let’s pray I’m correct.

Lazy Man’s Scam Scale

October 7, 2018 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

When I was writing about why you shouldn’t trust the Better Business Bureau (BBB), I got an interesting comment from Contrarian about something else consumers should know: city specific magazines hire sales people to contact companies directly and sell their “Best of” rankings for a price.

I didn’t know that was true, and I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but Contrarian has been spot on with his analysis on any of things in the past. More important than that though, it simply makes sense. There are a lot of consumers that use those those “Best of” rankings to make their purchasing decision. It wouldn’t surprise me if Boston magazine realized that space in its Best of Boston was a valuable commodity and tried to capitalize on it as such. I’m not saying that they do that and again, I have no evidence, but I’m just saying that it isn’t just plausible, it seems probable to me.

Similar to that though, I heard two separate people who don’t know each either, tell me of businesses that have gotten what seems to amount to extortion from Yelp. They said that their bad reviews were at the top of the page and that for a fee (perhaps combined with an advertisement, I can’t remember), the company would feature some of the better reviews ahead. One person told me that they her friend wrote a $3000 check on the spot. The other business owner declined. One of the stories is at least a few years old now and I can’t say that Yelp as a publicly traded still works that way. Yelp’s site today says the default sort doesn’t take into account advertising.

I took Contrarian’s Best of [City X] example and applied it to the advertisements that you see in the airplane magazines for the best steakhouses and best doctors. It’s very clear to me that they are advertisements, they even have the advertisement size box on the page instead of a full article written by someone reputable. Rational Therapeutics has an article about being approached to be featured in such an advertisement. This is an obvious advertisement to me, even though the magazines claim to vet the paying doctors and steakhouses, but Energi Gal mentions that she falls for it occasionally and as a very successful pharmacist she’s pretty bright.

My argument was that this the airplane magazine/best steakhouse scam was pretty easy to spot and the BBB being untrustworthy was not. Then Contrarian suggested that MLM is a pretty obvious scam. I personally don’t believe it is quite obvious. If it were, I wouldn’t have 6,000 comments on my MonaVie article with people claiming that the fruit juice cured every medical condition under the sun. If it were such an obvious scam, you’d think there wouldn’t be 15 million Americans caught up in it.

This gave me an idea: we need to have a scam scale. I’m thinking something along the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, but it would clearly be more subjective and less objective. Maybe I could make it scientific by allowing people to vote. I get the feeling that it wouldn’t work, because people with a vested interest in MLM say that it isn’t a scam at all.

In developing this scam scale idea, I determined there are two main factors going into the scam:

How devious / cleaverly disguised the scam is…
… and how much the scam is going to harm you

While I’m personally very interested in the more devious scams, I have to admit that if they aren’t going to hurt you, they aren’t that bad. For example, if you go to one of steakhouses listed in the airline magazine as one of the best, you are most likely to still get a decent steak for your money. On the other end of the spectrum, if you gave your life savings to Bernie Madoff to invest, you may find that you lost it all. That’s a pretty harmful scam. (It’s devious too, since most people had no way of really knowing he was running a pyramid scheme.)

With that in mind, I’ve decided to rate a scam on a scale of 1 to 10 in deviousness and harmfulness. I take the deviousness score and add it to twice the harmfulness score and divide by three. This gives extra weight to the scams that are more harmful. I took a few of things that I consider scams and put a subjective ranking to them and put them in a nice table sorted by Scam Score:

Lazy Man Scam Scale
Scam	Deviousness	Harmfulness	Scam Score
X-Ray Specs	1	1	1.0
Airplane Magazine/Best Steakhouses	3.5	1	1.8
Male Enhancement Pills	2	3	2.7
Best of [City X]	6	1	2.7
Better Business Bureau	7	2	3.7
Visalus	7	8	7.7
One24	7.5	7.8	7.7
Jusuru	7.5	8.2	8.0
Bidding Fee Auction	8.5	8	8.2
MonaVie	8	8.2	8.1
Bernie Madoff	9.5	9.5	9.5

I put the old-fashion X-Ray specs that kids bought in the 1950’s as very small scam. I hope few adults actually thought they were getting glasses that could see through things. In the worst case you were out a few dollars and moved on with your life. I view male enhancement pills in the mold, I hope most adults know better than to expect them to work, but at least you aren’t typically out too much money. I thought the Best of [City X] is a little more devious, because it isn’t obvious to the consumer that sales reps may or may not have sold off the position for best BBQ restaurant in town.

You’ll see that in the 7.5 – 9 range, I have various multi-level marketing companies. I think they are particularly devious as they often pitch themselves as legit business opportunities when over 99% of people lose money in them and their products are often claimed to be of a higher quality than they are. Some of them like ViSalus will give people an incentive to take out a big BMW lease in their own name and then stick them with that burden if their sales drop… a very devious scam in my view. MonaVie is particularly devious in trying to convince consumers that two ounces of their juice is equal to eating 13 fruits and vegetables – I can’t tell you how many distributors fall for that.

All these MLMs are fairly harmful because month after month you lose money buying overpriced product in hopes of business opportunity that isn’t there. In the case of MonaVie, it is $1600 a year in just juice… and this doesn’t factor in other costs of running the business which can run 5 times that. In the case of MonaVie some people actually stop taking their medication, which is harmful in more than just a monetary sense.

Now it’s your turn. What other scams should I include on the scale? Do you agree with my ratings or not? Finally, feel free to point me to scam scale that already exists. That’s par for the course as most of my good ideas are already implemented elsewhere.