S1 E1: Wanna Swim in Cash?

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Pretend I'm somebody that you've just met and I seem like...

Oh, you

this pitch.

Give me the pitch.

Oh, well,

come on.

You know, you can give me $1,500 and in a week you can walk away with $12,000.

You know, we have endless resources.

I've got a list of people that even if you don't know them, I know them and you can call them.

And all you have to do is be positive and they will get it from you.

Come on, you can do this.

I know you.

You're a great salesperson.

I trust you.

I believe in you.

And I'd like to share this opportunity with you.

You know, this is, don't give me your last $1,500.

But if you've got $1,500 that's kicking around, that you're thinking about what I should do with it, do this.

Do this.

Yeah.

I did it.

I'm in.

Yeah, you're in.

I know you're in.

I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream, episode one.

Want to swim in cash?

When we first started making this show, we were super pumped, jazzed, but we had to keep the topic under wraps for as long as possible.

The subjects of our investigation are highly litigious, for one thing, and we had to get close.

inside how they work without them freaking out and closing ranks.

That was touchy enough.

But then there's this other thing.

Half of my family and most of my friends from my hometown are involved directly, intimately.

And we're going to bring you into their world.

It's sketchy and crazy making and almost unbelievable.

Anyway, it was frustrating this not being able to talk about it thing.

Like I said, I was super pumped and I talk a lot.

One night, I let it slip to one of my best friends that we'd gotten a new gig.

The exchange went like this.

All I can say is that it's kind of about pyramid schemes.

And he goes, Oh,

you should talk to my mom.

What?

Yeah, my mom ran one of those when I was a kid out of our house.

A literal pyramid scheme.

Picture this loft.

There is a 16-foot-high, 22-foot-wide

window overlooking the World Trade Center.

Ladies and gentlemen, my friend's mom, Nan Dillon.

So it's got white pickled floors, a 16-foot ceiling, and 3,500 square feet.

It is jammed.

Hundreds of people showed up.

You can't even walk.

There are so many people.

In order to not be suffocated by the crowd, I climbed up the spiral staircase going to the second floor just to observe.

And I remember just kind of sitting on that staircase overlooking this crowd of people as they moved around the room making alliances, you know, creating future

groups.

Back in the 80s, Nan was working in advertising and raising her three kids in Manhattan.

I was only just, you know, newly unmarried and just kind of coming back into the world.

It was kind of an exciting time for me that, you know, life is new.

I'm feeling very empowered and on a personal basis, filled with an idea that I was smart and adventurous and I could do anything I wanted to do.

and that life was just an adventure.

The timing of Nan's rebirth, if you will, couldn't have have been better.

See, at that exact moment, a cultural phenomenon was taking hold in New Agey circles all over the country.

It was called the human potential movement.

Think of it as sort of a precursor to the secret.

You know, just visualize abundance and happiness and voila, you're rich and skinny or whatever.

In that time in New York City, there was a lot of

human potential movement groups kind of it was all about energy.

You know, energy out is energy in.

And you get what you give and all of that, you know, power of positive whatever.

In the midst of this movement sits an untethered man

riding this new wave of endless opportunity.

And along comes this exciting concept where if you

If you put a bunch of money in and you could talk other people into joining you, that everybody could make a lot of money and it was all cash and it was all fast and it was all fun and very optimistic and exciting.

This new thing was presented as a game called the airplane game.

As Nan remembers it, anyone who was even tangentially related to the whole human potential movement was a buzz about the airplane game.

Parties introducing it to newcomers were being held all over Lower Manhattan.

The way she describes it, they looked kind of like literary salons with people giving inspiring lectures at their bohemian flats in the East Village and a bunch of aging hippies sitting sitting around cross-legged, rapt with attention.

There were stories about these people who had come from California, who took up residence in some lecture hall in the East Village, and these people were giving lectures on the new way of, you know, making money while stepping aside from the establishment.

It took a minute, but being in that world, eventually Nan agreed to attend one of these meetups and to learn more about this exciting opportunity.

The first time I remember asking somebody, well, wait a second, how does this thing work?

I was trying to understand it.

He said, well, there's a pilot and there's two co-pilots and there are

passengers and you pay to fly.

These were obviously not literal airplanes.

Picture this.

People would set up chairs in the shape of a triangle or pyramid with one chair at the front.

That's the pilot seat.

Behind that person, there were two chairs for co-pilots, four crew behind them, and eight passengers in the last row.

Those eight passengers were the new recruits who put in $1,500 a piece.

As they recruited more people, they moved up the ranks until eventually they became a pilot themselves and took the pot.

Then they moved on to another airplane.

The chairs weren't absolutely necessary.

Sometimes these planes were just represented by charts, but the principle was the same.

So it was this revolving thing of

you pay and then you wait

and then everything moves very quickly

and you are before you know it, like we're talking about four days,

you are a pilot and people are paying you.

I can't remember some of the timing of this, but I did say yes to having a recruitment party at my loft in Tribeca.

Somebody planned it, called me and said, Okay, if we come to your place.

And

it was at that event that I started thinking, ooh, this is like, this is getting out of hand.

It was extraordinary and giddy-making.

I mean, it was really intoxicating and fun.

Until somebody leaned up to me and said, I think there are some FBI men in the room.

I went, oh, far out.

Is it really?

This interview with Nan was, to use her words, giddy-making.

Naturally, I come out of the studio and start telling all the other producers on our team about this airplane game.

And that's when one of them says that the airplane game had come up in their reporting too.

It turns out one of our experts, a guy named Robert Fitzpatrick, you'll hear a lot from him this season, he got his start in studying this sort of thing because he had played the airplane game too.

I think it was a telephone call, yes, and it was an invitation to come to a meeting that was going to be held in someone's house.

It was presented as just something new, a movement, an event.

It was quite vague as to what it was.

And

like thousands of others, I was invited to participate.

When the airplane game reached Robert Fitzpatrick in Broward County, Florida, he was a perfect fit.

Robert was a self-starter, founded his own trade magazine, and worked as a community organizer.

He got invited to play and the party he went to was just as exhilarating as Nan's, but there was something more to it.

Something sweet, neighborly, wholesome even.

When you went in, there was an immediate sentiment, a feeling, an air of happiness, euphoria, welcoming.

There was excitement.

There was a speaker.

People were reminded of their own goals and their hopes for a better life.

And it was presented as a kind of system that enabled people to achieve their life's purpose.

Like Nan, Robert and his friends were heavily influenced by the human potential movement.

And the airplane game, to them, it just seemed like a logical extension of that way of thinking.

I myself at that time time

had

been interested in personal development, transformational types of programs.

This was the 80s.

This was in the air.

There's a certain type of person who was already fantasizing about their airplane game strategy, like with spreadsheets and charts and party plans and a vision board.

Nan was one of those people.

So I take two weeks off of work and put my, what I called my flight plans up on the wall and go to work.

It's $1,500 to join, but it's not a fee.

It's a kind of a contribution.

It's what you put into it.

And it's all based on giving and receiving.

It's sharing.

It's non-competitive.

You pay, and then you wait,

and then everything moves very quickly.

And you are, before you know it, like we're talking about four days,

you are a pilot and people are paying you.

If you're wondering, $1,500 back then would be like $3,500 today.

So imagine a stream of people walking up and handing you three or four grand.

That adds up fast.

And Nan was told, everyone who enters the game could walk away with $12,000.

Again, that'd be like getting almost 30 grand for going to a party.

That number absolutely sent a current of electricity through the room.

The idea that someone whom you knew and trusted had received $12,000 in a matter of days,

it somehow clicked that this was correct.

This is the way it ought to work.

That thinking correctly in America is supposed to lead to prosperity.

And there is a whole current of thinking like this, which I had been subjected to, and virtually everybody had been subjected to, but particularly people who had studied this kind of new thought philosophy, that positive attitude, confidence, and right thinking attracted to you

good things.

There's enough for everybody.

Scarcity is an illusion.

And that is that kind of competitive scarcity-based thinking that has held everyone back and that this system breaks through that.

I mean, sales is what I did.

So I was able to attract a lot of people.

And I had been in seminars with people.

I had been in all of these different groups with people.

So I had a huge roster of people that I knew that I could call upon and people who had who had enough exposure to me to be able to trust me.

Initially, the people that were joining were those who really were oriented to that kind of thinking.

I considered myself kind of wily,

you know, like one of the first in Tribeca, you know, managed to wheedle my way into a 3,500 square foot loft that I paid $700 a a month for.

If you're the type of person who moved into a 3,500 square foot loft in Tribeca in 1987, then you're probably also the type of person who'd have no problem figuring out how to get the most out of this game.

You, like Nan, would be raking it in.

Some others got up and said not only had they received that, they had re-entered it as a passenger and gone through the process again and received another $12,000.

So these were testimonials that now

the mechanism, the math of this, the structure

sort of went into the background.

Every time I made money, I would buy into another plane.

I mean, what the heck?

You pay $1,500 and make $12,000.

I can be in five or six planes all at the same time, which is what I did.

I was able to attract a lot of people and the money started to flow immediately.

The kids used to gather around the bed as I would just, you know,

laugh and invite them to jump into the cash that was all over the bed.

You know, it was just hilariously fun.

I mean, at that point, there had to be 30 or 40, maybe $50,000,

like in, you know, $100 bills or something.

It was just crazy.

You know, it wasn't that it was so much money, but it was all cash.

And it was like mountains of cash.

And that was, that was the scene that arrived with me.

Sort of, hey, kids, you want to swim in cash?

You know, come on into mommy's room and let's all let's all swim in cash.

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Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

I'm Hannah Bruner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

I like to call them my granny panties.

Actually, I never think about underwear.

That's the magic of Tommy John.

Same, they're so light and so comfy.

And if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

See site for details.

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Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn earn the variable APY.

These piles of cash, they were coming from somewhere.

And while Nan's passengers were more or less acquaintances with money to play with, Robert's community in South Florida was made up of friends and family.

At some level, we knew that If we said this to someone we didn't know, if we couldn't leverage the trust and relationship we already had, it would probably sound bizarre.

It would sound

commercial.

It would sound crass.

But if I know you, it can suddenly transform into

something in which I am giving.

It's something that you would share intimately almost.

And that took the commercial edge off of it, even though what was it all about?

$1,500 turning into $12,000, 800% return.

You know, it didn't take much to know that that was ridiculous.

But

I knew

it was trappings for a Ponzi scheme.

I just didn't care.

Eventually, there will be a peasant in Bangladesh who

can't come up with the money

and the game will die.

I knew that.

Okay,

where were we?

While Nan was swimming in cash, Scrooge McDuck style, with her kids, Robert's back in Florida, watching his neighbors and friends get hooked on this new game.

I lived in South Florida around 1986, and the airplane game arrived and it exploded.

It just became a sort of mania.

People were smiling.

There were a lot of familiar faces there,

people that I knew.

They looked like me.

They were dressed like me, many professionals.

So it looked very familiar, very safe, very comfortable.

And remember, there was no product.

This was not a business.

It was not a church.

It was part of a philosophy.

it was a story.

You used an assumed

philosophical name, courage,

commitment,

fanciful names like this.

I was invited by someone I knew and trusted.

I was in a home of someone that was a mutual friend.

There were plenty of people there I knew.

There was a feeling of excitement.

There was nothing about it that initially made me think of it as in any way illegal, fraudulent, unethical.

The people that I knew and the people that I could call on were these kind of superficial liaisons that I had created by participating in these human potential movement groups.

You may know their deepest, darkest secrets, but

strangely enough,

it didn't make them your friend.

You could walk away from any one of them and never miss anybody.

For For Robert, this whole thing was way more complicated.

It hit a lot closer to home.

Leveraging trust was a key element.

One of the people that

I approached was the person I later married.

So that's how close it got.

The money started to flow immediately.

I did not think about the people who would be losing.

I figured, hey, lots of people to go through.

If they can keep the faith and keep the energy high, yes, of course, people will lose.

I knew that.

But it seemed very, very far away to me.

And of course, at that point in time, everybody was not telling themselves that this was illegal.

They were telling themselves that the feds don't like it because there's no tax being paid and they want in.

That was the attitude.

It wasn't, you know, we're doing criminal activity.

It was like, you know,

screw them.

You know, we're doing this on the side and we are making up our own rules and

everybody is a willing partner here.

What's the problem?

What we did decide early on was that the reason that anything could be problematic was if there was money paid, but no services rendered or no product sold.

So we decided that what you needed to do was give something for the money.

So what we did was

we would present

roses.

I guess in our minds we thought, well, that's that.

We have the feds fooled.

So when people came in and delivered money in big fat envelopes, I would present them with a rose.

So they were buying my flower.

It was a $1,500 rose.

Yes, a very, very special rose.

I have this image of, you know, being in the middle of my busy day in the advertising agency where I was working and having the receptionist call back to say that Vladimir

You know was in the was in the waiting room and did I want to see him they didn't have any idea who he was and I was saying absolutely Just reaching for one of my roses out of the bouquet that I would buy every day to bring to work and go out to the receptionist and present this guy with a rose that he, a very expensive rose.

You know, I'm a grown-up.

I know what a Ponzi scheme is when I hear one.

I said, oh, far out.

So I know what that is.

But no, I didn't care.

There were some other kind of hard to convince people, and I found myself suddenly with this sale not being quite as easy as it was in the beginning.

We had our attention on winning, we didn't have any attention on losing.

And then the problem happened.

There's this concept in pyramid schemes or Ponzi schemes.

It's called the endless chain.

It posits that the supply of people coming in on the bottom tier is infinite.

You'll never run out of new recruits.

It's a foundational idea and without it, the whole thing collapses.

And of course, unless you eventually start recruiting babies or something, it's a completely false premise, especially with a scheme that moves as quickly as the airplane game.

It doesn't take long to run out of people who have an extra $1,500 lying around.

The people that we were recruiting were no longer on the high achievement level of the first people who had gotten in.

So they didn't have the energy, they didn't have the optimism, and they didn't have the sales ability to sell

their planes.

And now it started to look hard to these people.

And they started to see, oh my God, maybe I'll just lose my money.

I can't do this.

As it progressed, we began noticing that some of the people coming in, they looked aggressive.

They looked

Well, greedy.

They looked opportunistic.

And they didn't seem seem to reflect the language anymore.

They just saw it as a chance to make money.

There were doubts that had begun to enter.

The type of people coming in, that certain people would warn you.

The word pyramid scheme was uttered by some people.

There was a sense that it might not last forever.

These were doubts that were introduced.

But still, these were banished, put aside.

And then an article appeared in the local newspaper.

Someone at the local paper had caught wind of a potential fraud going on around town.

And do you know who reads the paper in the late 80s in Broward County, Florida?

Everyone.

The

County Sheriff's Department had gotten word of this and considered it an illegal pyramid scheme and warned people against it.

And this was followed by arrests.

The Sheriff's Department raided some of these house meetings and arrested people, handcuffed them, and took them away.

Remember, this entire thing is a grassroots phenomenon.

There were people that had started it.

There were a few people that had manipulated it at the beginning, who made tens of thousands of dollars, but it had no official structure.

They got word about a house meeting.

They went there and they arrested whoever was at the front of the room making the presentation, who may have been a very low-level person, actually, as the scheme had already gotten into tens of thousands of people's lives by that point.

The newspaper accounts the next day reported these arrests, and now they were saying things like, and these people use assumed names.

They pay in cash.

They expect an 800% return.

It's done personally without using the mail to avoid mail and wire fraud charges.

All of a sudden, these elements of the program that we considered innocent

were depicted as maneuvers to evade the law.

And the whole thing looked, in the context of the article, as a crass, ridiculous, absurd program of dim-witted people who didn't even understand that they were being duped into a fraud.

When we saw it in black and white, of course the element of being arrested sent terrible fear through everyone,

through the communities, because now your friendship suddenly became a liability.

And people began now to avoid each other, frightened that someone would blow the whistle on you, you might be reported.

So what had become this wonderful bond bringing so many people together in which private, intimate, personal, collegial relationships had actually been commercialized, but in the language of a philosophy that almost denied the element of commercialism, those same relationships now became threats.

Now, also,

people who had given money might want it back.

And so there was this element, too.

of now debt and obligation.

So the whole thing became quite nightmarish at that point.

And that's where things ended for Robert.

Nan's reasons for quitting the game weren't quite as dire, but they do help explain some fundamentally flawed aspects of this, quote, business model.

I had a guy who I knew I shouldn't have recruited.

He was just too much of a downer.

He was a guy who always thought that the other guy was getting something that he wasn't getting.

He was not an empowered person.

I made a mistake.

The top people, the energetic people that I knew had jumped, and now we were getting down to the

people who,

against your better judgment, you said yes to.

Yeah, greed takes over and you try to, you know, you don't always follow your intuition when somebody's waving money at you.

You just say, all right.

I knew that this guy was borderline, but I thought, well, I'll help him and maybe he'll do okay and maybe this will be fine.

Well, he didn't do okay and he started to complain this is too hard I can't find anybody

don't you realize that this is a Ponzi scheme and that somebody really has to lose I think I'm going to be one of the people that loses my lawyer is saying this is illegal and I'm going oh my god oh my god listen to this I accepted a check from him

and

I didn't even bother cashing the check.

This is how blase I was.

I mean, I was really guilty of hubris.

i had endorsed the check in the back and written it over to my my kids school for for payment for payment of tuition i thought i was just saving a step so now he had written proof that he had given me this money for no reason at all and now his lawyer was saying that that he could make big trouble for me.

So I said, oops.

And I suddenly realized that this might be the end of this game.

So he called me up and started threatening me with all of his stuff in his whining, complaining,

loser way.

So I said, okay, I get it.

You know, I can meet you, you know, in half an hour and I'll give you every cent that you've given me, I'm going to give you back.

And in exchange, you'll just make this go away.

It didn't cost me anything really to get rid of him.

And I knew that he was so fragile that if I didn't do this, that I could have real problems.

So I did it.

I mean, it took me five minutes to tell him, you got it.

You know, you've got your money back.

Don't worry about it.

So I met this guy in the corner, gave him his money.

He ripped up whatever record he had of the check and, you know, gave me his word that it was over.

We shook hands and had a big hug and I went back and ripped the plans off the wall and I said, you know, it's over.

We're done.

Went back to work the next day.

That was that.

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Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

I like to call them my granny panties.

Actually, I never think about underwear.

That's the magic of Tommy John.

Same.

They're they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com slash comfort.

See site for details.

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I didn't know what a pyramid scheme was.

And if whatever I did think I knew of it, I didn't think it was something that would show up among my friends.

I thought it would be a group of sleazy-looking characters wearing a lot of gold, maybe.

But it...

It wouldn't be people that had attended all these courses and were trying, and were good, ethical, altruistic people.

If pyramid schemes were only run run by sleazy guys who would also try to sell you a Rolex out of their trench coat, we wouldn't be talking about any of this.

Roping in otherwise wonderful, lovable people who you trust is crucial to making these sorts of things work.

Just because I was stopping, I didn't think that it meant that anybody else was stopping.

I never gave them a thought.

I mean, that's probably, you know, me as a terrible person, but

I did not experience that I had left anybody hanging.

Okay, here's where you get to find out what this show is really about.

Remember at the beginning I said it's kind of about pyramid schemes.

It's actually about something called multi-level marketing or direct sales or network marketing.

And there are a lot of companies that work this way, where you recruit someone to work under you, and then they hopefully recruit someone to work under them and so on and so forth.

And they are, are, legally speaking anyway, not pyramid schemes.

As much as one would like to classify them this way, we're not allowed to.

Not yet.

Robert Fitzpatrick is an expert in these sorts of schemes.

That's why we call them in the first place, which is what made it so shocking that he had been taken in by one.

Well, let us just go forward to 2008 and have people offered loans which they did not have to show their own income that were told the house will go up in value forever.

Don't worry whatever the mortgage payment is.

Don't worry about that payment where you get a low interest for a year and then it changes over.

But don't worry because you'll be able to refinance because the house will have already gone up in value by then.

You nailed me.

You nailed me.

I did it.

Right.

Oh, there you go.

So if you knew that, if you experienced that, if you accepted that without question, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I loved the house.

I wanted it.

There you go.

And didn't you deserve it?

Isn't this the way it's supposed to be?

Haven't you worked hard?

Oh, boy.

I mean, you're a good person, and aren't good things supposed to happen to good people.

And isn't our economy supposed to offer this kind of opportunity?

These opportunities don't seem to be showing up in work,

but they must be out there.

Well, here it shows up in the real estate market

or the stock market.

Or, I mean, there are so many other places where this kind of prosperity thinking,

and that is what we're talking about here.

It is native to America.

It came here from the Puritans.

This is what I spent five or six years tracing down because I wanted to understand how in the hell did I not see this?

Oh, they call it like business networking, or I mean, I just can't even imagine anybody being hooked in to any one of these things anymore.

I mean, what, disguised as business networking or something?

This entire fraudulent structure based on the endless chain, which is unsustainable, mathematically impossible, was obscured by simply a story about giving and receiving.

In multilevel marketing, exactly the same structure, mathematically impossible, unsustainable, and so on, that will produce these massive loss rates is covered over by a different story.

It's the story that you are actually buying and selling products, that it's a business called direct selling.

You've never been into a direct sales company.

It's kind of hard to understand, but there is no complant out there that can beat it.

Our guys are making triple and quadruple the money.

You know, your best friend that you've been best friends with since high school and she's struggling a little bit and you know her so well, like call her up.

We are building so quickly here and you can make some serious money.

And anyone worth recruiting will also see it as a relationship.

Let me say that again.

I want you to hear me again.

Anyone worth recruiting will see joining you in this business as a relationship.

Okay?

Don't get too informative.

If they ask you the informative questions, like

give them that information, but do it in a very fun, relaxed, uplifting way.

We're at a ground floor level, people.

People are not realizing what we have now and are not taking advantage of it.

I want you to take advantage of this opportunity and be able to just fly with it.

If you recruit others, you'll move up the chain.

And indeed, in multi-level marketing, it's designed to transfer money from 99% to 1%.

You want someone who will give it their all and stick around.

Multilevel marketing has codified into an actual business the deceptions, the delusions, the manipulations that the airplane game introduced.

It's amazing, and it's not too good to be true.

It's still based on a prosperity belief that we are entitled to these good things, that they can come to you through belief, through confidence, and through positive thinking.

That thinking is now introduced and taught in multi-level marketing in a very sophisticated manner.

So much so that there's no police department, there's no authority in the country right now that will openly acknowledge this for what it is, look at it in depth, and just show you in plain black and white that this thing is unsustainable and that it is indeed a racket.

No one until now.

This season on the dream, we take you behind the MLM curtain and follow the money from the lowest level to the top, the very top.

Donald Trump received over a million dollars in one year for simply endorsing multi-level marketing.

You have a great opportunity before you at ACN without any of the risks most entrepreneurs have to take.

You have the ability to market breakthrough technology before it hits the critical mass.

The beauty of ACN is that you're in business for yourself, but not by yourself.

You have a great partner by your side with you every step of the way.

You're entrepreneurs, yes, but being an entrepreneur is even better when you have the support of great company like ACN.

Coming up this season on the dream.

It's so easy to use excuses because it means You don't have to be responsible for your results.

You get to blame someone or something else for why you don't have what you want.

But is that how you want to live?

Is that the conversations you want to have?

Wait, how much is this going to cost though, actually?

I think it's going to cost maybe six or seven hundred dollars.

Oh my God.

I mean, I need to stay in a hotel.

I'm over a thousand dollars now.

No, we're way over a thousand dollars.

Now we're up to like $1,500.

If you look at the Federal Trade Commission fraud statistics, pyramid scheme and business opportunity fraud are the least reported fraud types that they monitor.

Really?

So this is not something that people like to tell people about.

I just don't think, you know, sort of the accurate picture is just is out there.

And my point, no, I want to make this point.

If the number was screwed up or there was no basis for it, then the administrative law judge would have said Brownman's numbers are phony.

I'm not here to tell you that I was right.

What I am telling you is that I was ignored.

You just plop it on your own personal credit card.

No one's going to say boo.

All you have to do is order product in your team members' names and have it shipped to your address or another address.

The company does not care if you sell the product.

They just care if you buy it.

The guys up on the stage there talking about you just get five and the five get 25.

Look at the potential here.

I raised my hand and said,

so I've got my calculator here.

I'm just, you know, it doesn't make sense.

First of all, you know, if you just keep going, you'd pass the population of Canada in just a few levels.

He started laughing.

He says, Look at that guy.

He's put a calculator in his hand.

If you have to go consult numbers in order to believe in your own ability to make this thing work, you'll never succeed.

And the crowd is laughing.

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me, Jane Marie, Dan Gallucci, Mackenzie Kassab, Lyra Smith, and Claire Rawlinson.

Editing by Peter Clowney.

Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.

The Dream is executive produced by Laura Mayer, Chris Bannon, Dan Gallucci, and me.

Special thanks today to Jenny Rattlet, Nicole Cliff, Jamie Maline, Nan Dillon, Robert Fitzpatrick, and Matt Most.

We appreciate you subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show wherever you listen.

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Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here.

The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.

It's $5 a month.

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We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So, what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit-chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping, and it's there.

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