Yes.

If you’d like to come to my free one hour seminar, I can tell you all about it.

The usual: in college, desperate for work in a saturated college-city market I worked for Vector Marketing selling Cutco knives–one of the more humilating periods of my life–and interviewed for several other “jobs” that turned out to be MLM sales (e.g., I think a knockoff perfume company called “observe l’essence”?). I also tried to sell cars. Holy shit the people I worked with were horrible humans (except 1.5 of them).

In a slightly less horrible vein I spent a summer (late 90s) in a call center for BellSouth.net, which mostly consisted of telling people to type their passwords in very carefully or reboot their computer. When someone found out I spoke Spanish I was given all Spanish, Portuguese, and even Italian customers, and released from all quotas and average call time metrics. This was good, because trying to work out what a Brazilian customer was saying on the phone was hard enough, but Italian (and maybe one time Romanian)? Took hours.

Oh, the scammy part of that was minor: we were in a faceless warehouse on the outkirts of Columbus, Ohio, but we were instructed to always keep websites open for Atlanta, GA and to talk about the weather, sports, etc. and pretend we were in Atlanta.

The oddest part of that job was that our floor of the warehouse/call center was shared with a brand new and kind of weird company that had just started running TV ads: priceline.com. We had breaks with priceline employees on a regular basis.

My old manager was stopping by the store he used to work at that I still worked at the time. He was a friendly guy who trained me on my first job, and I of course trusted him. He claimed to have a business opportunity for me that would pay loads higher than what I made there, which was barely above federal minimum wage in the early 2010s, and that I was the hardest working person he ever managed and that he was taking a chance on me. We scheduled a time to meet at some cafe to discuss, he spent probably 2 hours hyping up the position, that I would be my own boss and get to employ my friends if they were interested to work for me. In the entire time, he never even mentioned WTF the business was, whether it was selling a good or service, nothing. I had to directly ask him what it was at the end of his spiel, and he said it was selling insurance (Primerica I think?) and that I would have to pay a monthly fee and pay to complete some training first, but that I would make so much money it wouldn’t matter. He asked for the names and numbers of 10 of my friends, to which I said that I’m not giving their info without their permission. Then he pressured me to text my friends to get their permission on the spot, and I stupidly did ask a couple of friends. I was young and dumb, barely out of high school. Luckily I felt that something wasn’t right so I told him it sounds like a plan and would get a hold of my friends later, but that I needed to go home. Of course I called my mom on the way home who told me it was a pyramid scheme, so I texted my old manager to let him know since I figured he was just as unaware as me. He denied it of course, trying to get me to meet up again, saying he didn’t explain it right, etc. I warned everyone that I worked with, and have never seen him again. Fuck MLMs, man.

I went to an interview for Life Insurance sales. once the initial interview was over I was sent into a conference room where other interviewees joined me and we were pitched the idea of becoming life insurance sales-people which required studying, testing, and licensing which they insisted we all payed for ourselves. After a 20-minute pitch by some d-bag with frosted tips said “Growing up I always dreamed of owning a Maserati, after my success joining this company I drive a Maserati!” The moment he was done talking I got up, turned left and went out the emergency exit. I still associate d-bags with Maserati driver and that was close to twenty years ago.

Well, I went through a recruitment process for a Ponzi scheme company. It was wild, but the first filter was an interview by some “hot” woman (sorry, I was like 21) so, I guess I was nervous and passed to the next part of the recruitment process. This third part (the first was only a couple of documents) was frankly nauseous for my kind of education, in this phase, a proper brainwash about how unions, worker rights and health insurance are just obstacles between us and real success in life and some other nonsense, happened to a group of applicants clearly infiltrated. At that exact moment I wanted to go home, but somehow I was feeling unsafe surrounded by the staff (people, I guess, already in the Ponzi scheme). They wanted us to come back the next day to sell perfumes for free or to buy them perfumes to sell by ourselves or something. Of course, I didn’t come back, but it was traumatizing.

Oh, actually, /u/bobbyfiend, already mentioned the same kind of “business”, except this is Mexico. It’s not rare to find these “ideas” being deployed in several countries, like Scientology.

I went to a job interview at a financial services company as a young man. There was no interview, just a sales pitch and I was asked to provide the contact info and career (income estimates) of ten people before I could be hired. I think they were selling mortgage refinancing or something. I just got up and left.

Probably 1997, way before anyone had cell phones routinely, I went to an open house kind of interview for some cell phone company who were hiring people to go door to door. They hired everyone who came on the spot, and I never heard from them after that day. The only thing I remember was when the guy who interviewed me said that eventually everyone would have their own phone number, and that was such a foreign concept then.

I was fresh out of college so was very susceptible to anyone calling for an interview invite. Got a call from a company I didn’t recognize and I was too innocent to not question how they even got my number. I dressed up and everything, brought my resume, etc. When I arrived, there was a bunch of us and then there was a presentation.

Yep, you guessed it, it was an MLM. It was the mid 2000s, so it wasn’t really well known as an MLM or pyramid scheme at the time. Hell, I couldn’t even understand why I was sitting through a presentation and not doing an interview. I realized it wasn’t a job when they started asking for money to commit. Barely 20 me still didn’t realize it’s a scam, but fortunately I literally had no money so couldn’t offer anything either way lol. After a lot of prodding, they finally let me go if I wrote down the names and number of 5 people I know. Then I realized that’s how they got my number. Someone in my circle went through the same thing and gave my contact info away.

I spent 1 hour of unpaid work experience for a telephone provider. I found out on the day that I would be handing out pamphlets in a supermarket.

The person who was supposed to be helping and/or supervising just gave me the pamphlets and walked off to chat with his girlfriend. The only time he intervened was to tell me off for answering a potential customer’s question. I knew the answer, but I was supposed to defer to him (not that he told me beforehand) so that he could sugar coat (read - lie about) the answer.

I never went back, and tell all my friends to avoid that company. I’ve since discovered that they also do many illegal things to get more money from their customers, but will suddenly comply if you know your rights so that they never get caught.

I sold student loan forgiveness for about 2 weeks in my early 20s (circa 2010ish), the first of which was “training”. When I actually looked at the terms of the program and the associated interest rates, I told my buddy that got me in that he was a scumbag and walked right out.

I worked for a vanity publisher that would publish literally anything you sent to them. But you had to buy all of the books yourself. They did nothing to help promote your book. They would cold ship books to bookstores along with a bill, most either refused the shipments, or dumped them.

I did the layout for children’s books. And let me tell you, when I say they would publish anything I mean anything. There was a book about snails, but none of the “snails” had shells, and they all looked like penises. There were a couple kids science books that were factually incorrect. We were not allowed to correct or change anything.

In my early 20s while working a shit retail job, I was approached by a Ukrainian man in a cheap suit that was trying to recruit me for a marketing and sales job. I come from some money, so I know a nice suit when I see one; his suit was not terrible, but it wasn’t tailored/bespoke. So I knew he was trying to convey success, but was not successful.

We met at a Starbucks and talked about the work vaguely, he handed me some CDs that were speeches given by higher ups in the company. He also gave me a website to look at the products they offer and a sample of the caffeine-free “energy” drink they sold. It sounded off and I already knew it was part of a scam of some sort. We parted ways and I gave them a listen. The drink was about a generic and unremarkable health drink that included every buzzword of the 2010s healthy energy drink alternatives that never seemed to make it out of the first half of that decade.

The speeches were about success and business stuff. Very much screamed grifter motivational stuff that said nothing about the business.

He wanted to meet again and get my thoughts. He had not asked for money, he had not presented me with a contract or anything, so I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went. He described the job as being an independent business owner in direct digital marketing(giant red flag terms). He invited me to a “business meeting” at a hotel where I would learn more.

I showed up and I saw a lot of people in cheap suits, maybe a half dozen were in tailed suits and designer dresses. It was a hotel convention hall with a few hundred in the audience, the majority of which looked like they were grabbed from a low-paying job like me and the gas station worker that was also invited by the same guy as me.

There were a few speeches and a few explainations of the business structure and how you make more money. There was a lot of talking about how successful they were, how much their life changed, and how great their lives became. It was a pyramid scheme, a legal one, but just barely.

After, the guy I was talking to and his wife sat down with the other guy he invited and myself to chat about the next step. Dude tried really hard to hype everything up and convey excitement while he pitched the deal to us. He made the mistake of asking me what I thought after asking the other guy, who was excited. I told him that it was a pyramid scheme. The suit acted dumb and didn’t understand what a pyramid scheme was. I borrowed a pen and drew a diagram on a napkin of the “business structure”. He continued to play dumb and defended it, claiming that it is his business and it is legitimate. He humble bragged about buying his car in cash(a Chrysler 300) and how him and his wife are doing really well while the ticking Rolex told me how well he was actually doing. (If you didn’t know, a real Rolex second hand does not tick, it glides.)

I had obviously crushed the other invitee’s dreams of having a mansion, a luxury car, and vacations to tropical beaches with a trophy wife. At least I hope I did and he went on to live a modest life of joyous contention with mediocrity instead of chasing a lie that would require roping in anyone foolish enough to fall for the scam.

We concluded the conversation and I ghosted him, keeping like 6 of his CDs lol. I honestly don’t remember the name of the company. I think it was an Amway derivative, but I might be misremembering.

Way back I worked at a call center for “Explore Talent”. We were located in Oregon but had to tell everyone we were in LA. They even had the LA weather forecast written on the board so we could comment on the weather. Super slimy job taking advantage of desperate people giving them false hope for money. I didn’t last the month.

I interviewed for one. It’s was an “electric company” which offered people a “better rate” on their bills. It was a variable rate that wasn’t guaranteed to ever be lower overall.

Why, are you planning to set something up?