You get a message from someone you barely know. They saw your profile, they say. They think you would be “perfect” for something. They’re friendly, almost unnervingly so. There’s no hard sell yet, just a vague invitation to “learn more” about an “opportunity.” The tone is warm, personal, curious about you.
If you’ve been on the receiving end of this, you’re not imagining it. That friendliness is not accidental. It is a technique.
This is the first piece in Exit the Pyramid’s ongoing series on the psychology and mechanics of multi-level marketing recruitment. We’re starting here, not with the companies, not with the numbers, not with the scandals, because the recruitment conversation is where it all begins. Understanding why it feels the way it does is the first step toward recognizing it for what it is.
We know what it feels like from the inside. One of our editors responded to an unsolicited Instagram message and attended an IM Academy (now known as IYOVIA) session in the Netherlands. That account is woven throughout this piece.
The conversation that doesn’t mention what it’s selling
MLM recruitment tends to follow a recognizable pattern. The initial contact is friendly and vague. A meeting is proposed, sometimes framed as a casual coffee, sometimes as a “seminar” or “event,” rarely described clearly for what it is. The product or company is often not mentioned until well into the first conversation. This is not carelessness. It is strategy.
Research into MLM recruitment practices consistently identifies a set of psychological techniques used to lower resistance and build rapport before any pitch is made. These techniques are not invented by individual recruiters. They are taught, repeated in training sessions and upline mentorships, and passed down through the structure of the organization itself.
Our editor’s experience began with a private Instagram message from a stranger. The invitation was vague, the tone friendly. A phone call followed in which words like “crypto,” “e-commerce,” and “mindset” came up frequently, but the name of the company was not mentioned. The location turned out to be an office building on an otherwise empty industrial estate in Breukelen, The Netherlands. Upon arrival, our editor was greeted by two young men, aged 18 and 25, who introduced themselves as Thomas and Mario. Names have been changed.
The techniques, one by one
Mirroring and rapport-building
Skilled recruiters, and many MLM members are trained in this explicitly, mirror the speech patterns, body language, and energy of the person they’re talking to. This creates an unconscious feeling of similarity and trust. You feel, without knowing why, that this person gets you.
Combined with genuine curiosity and active listening, this can feel remarkably good, especially in a culture where most people are only half-listening to each other. The recruiter asks about your life, your frustrations, your goals. They seem interested. They remember what you say.
What they are also doing is gathering information, identifying the pressure points they will return to later.
Thomas and Mario were disarmingly relaxed. They asked our editor about his work, his ambitions, his views on “the system.” There was no formal structure to the conversation at first. It felt like talking to people who had known him for a while.
Validation and belonging
MLM communities place enormous emphasis on the feeling of being chosen and included. Recruitment conversations frequently involve phrases like “I thought of you specifically” or “not everyone would be a good fit for this.” This is flattery, but it also activates something deeper: the desire to belong to a group that recognizes your potential.
Social psychologists have long documented how powerfully humans respond to inclusion and recognition. For someone who feels overlooked at work, isolated at home, or uncertain about their future, the experience of being seen, even by a stranger, can be genuinely affecting. The Private Therapy Clinic describes this dynamic as one of the central mechanisms through which MLM schemes function like secular commercial cults, building emotional attachment before any rational evaluation of the offer takes place.
When our editor was introduced to other people in the office, mostly young men between 18 and 25, a pattern was immediately visible. They shared a vocabulary, a way of talking about ambition and “the regular world” that set insiders apart from outsiders. The message was clear without being stated: these people have figured something out. You could be one of them.
Aspirational lifestyle and future pacing
A key feature of MLM recruitment is the vivid projection of a different future. Recruiters describe, or show photographs and videos of, the life that awaits: flexibility, travel, passive income, financial independence. This technique, sometimes called “future pacing” in sales training, works by getting the listener to emotionally inhabit a desired outcome before any critical evaluation has taken place.
By the time someone is being asked to pay a joining fee, they may already have spent twenty minutes imagining what their life might look like if things worked out. The emotional investment comes before the financial one.
During the session our editor attended, a promotional video was shown of a company trip to Croatia: large crowds cheering for speakers on a stage, sunshine, the aesthetics of a music festival crossed with a corporate motivational event. Our editor was then told that, after one year of membership, he would be eligible for a company trip to Mexico, including a stay at a five-star hotel. The video was not presented as an advertisement. It was presented as evidence of what was waiting for him.
Quotes from motivational speakers appeared on screen throughout the presentation. Jim Rohn: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad was referenced multiple times as a kind of foundational text for understanding why conventional employment is a trap and why building income streams outside it is the only rational response.
Social proof
MLM meetings, whether in someone’s living room, a rented office, or a hotel conference room, are often attended by multiple people who are already enthusiastic members. This is not incidental. Seeing other people who are excited, committed, and apparently successful triggers a powerful cognitive shortcut: if this many people believe in it, there must be something to it.
Academic research has documented this function of community events and online testimonials extensively. The presence of “success stories,” members who give emotional accounts of how the company changed their lives, serves to override the statistical question that nobody in the room is asking: what happened to everyone who tried this and did not make it?
Research by Claudia Groß, Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, notes that in some MLM companies only roughly one in ten thousand participants reaches a meaningful high income, and that the continuous churn of members dropping out within the first six months is what keeps the few at the top financially sustained. The testimonials shown at recruitment events represent the exception, not the pattern.
Exclusivity and urgency
Once the pitch is made, time pressure is frequently applied. An offer expires. A team is nearly full. A special event is coming up. This is a standard sales technique, but in MLM it carries an additional function: it prevents the kind of slow, skeptical reflection that might lead someone to research the company independently before committing.
After ninety minutes, the session in Breukelen moved to its conclusion. The membership fee: $250 per month. When our editor indicated he wanted time to think it over, Thomas pushed back repeatedly. There was no point in thinking about it, he said, because thinking would not change the outcome. The decision was the decision. The tone remained friendly on the surface, but a new pressure had entered it. It was only when our editor moved toward the door that the conversation began to wind down. A brief tour of the office followed, perhaps to provide one final impression of the community before he left.
Why young people are especially vulnerable
None of the above techniques is unique to MLM. Advertising, politics, and ordinary salesmanship use versions of all of them. What makes MLM recruitment particularly effective, and particularly concerning, is the specific profile of people it tends to target and the social context in which it now operates.
Research consistently shows that young people, particularly those between the ages of 18 and 30, are disproportionately recruited into MLM structures. Several factors help explain this.
Financial anxiety is widespread. A generation navigating rising housing costs, precarious employment, and student debt is primed to respond to promises of financial freedom. The language of MLM, “be your own boss,” “build passive income,” “don’t work for someone else’s dream,” maps directly onto genuine anxieties about economic security.
Side hustle culture has normalized the idea of entrepreneurship as a moral virtue. Social media is saturated with content celebrating self-made success and the rejection of conventional employment. MLM recruitment inserts itself seamlessly into this conversation, presenting participation as the logical next step for someone who wants to take control of their financial future.
Online recruitment makes the entry point invisible. Unlike the Tupperware party of a previous generation, modern MLM recruitment happens over Instagram DMs, WhatsApp messages, and TikTok comments. The context is social, not commercial. The guard is down. A 2024 investigation by Zeist.NU found that young IM Academy members were systematically sending private messages to strangers on social media, combining vague language about income opportunities with videos of expensive cars and luxury travel destinations. Our editor received exactly this kind of message before attending the Breukelen session.
Loneliness and the search for community are real. The community that MLM organizations offer, the shared language, the group events, the mentorship structure, the constant affirmation, addresses a genuine social need. For young people who are new to a city, recently out of education, or struggling to find their place, that sense of belonging can be more compelling than the income pitch.
Former IM Academy members interviewed by Omroep Brabant (Dutch local broadcaster) in 2023 described the initial appeal in almost identical terms. One former member said: “At the beginning you feel like you’re part of something and that you’re important. Once you stop bringing in new members, they simply move on to the next person. I thought I had made friends in that organization. I don’t speak to any of them anymore.”
In the Breukelen office, the young men in the canteen fit a consistent profile. They described themselves as people who did not fit the regular school system. They were searching for something different, something that felt like theirs. The MLM had given them a framework for that search: a language, a hierarchy, a sense of upward movement. Whether the movement was real was a question the framework was not designed to ask.
Why the friendly recruiter often doesn’t know they’re doing it
It would be comforting to imagine that MLM recruitment is carried out by cynical operators who know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care. In reality, the picture is more complicated.
Many MLM members genuinely believe in what they’re selling, both the product and the opportunity. They have been told, often repeatedly, that critics are “negative thinkers” and that doubt is simply fear in disguise. The community reinforces this. The training materials reinforce it. The structure rewards those who recruit and punishes, through exclusion and declining status, those who begin to ask questions.
This means that the friendly recruiter sitting across from you is often also caught in the same system they’re recruiting you into. They have been taught that their enthusiasm is authentic, their opportunity is real, and that sharing it with you is an act of generosity. The manipulation, in this sense, goes all the way down.
Groß describes this as one of the defining features of MLM culture: the use of “toxic positivity” as a mechanism for keeping members from examining the structure they are inside. Any expression of doubt is reframed as a personal failing rather than a reasonable response to evidence. Critics are called “dream stealers.” The community closes ranks around its belief system, and members become resistant to outside information, including from family members and friends who raise concerns.
The Private Therapy Clinic notes that this dynamic, the elevation of loyal members, the ritualized shared language, the charismatic leadership figure, the targeting of people in vulnerable or transitional life stages, is structurally similar to mechanisms documented in cult research. The comparison is not made to be dramatic. It is made because it is analytically accurate.
Thomas and Mario were not performing enthusiasm. They believed in what they were doing. They spoke about their mentor with something close to reverence. They described the community in terms of family and purpose. What looked from the outside like a sales operation felt, to them, like a movement they had been fortunate enough to find.
What this means in practice
Understanding these techniques does not require a psychology degree. It requires only a moment of reflection when the warm DM arrives, when the vague invitation is extended, when someone is very interested in your dreams and goals before they have explained what they are selling.
Some questions worth holding onto: Why is this person being so friendly before they have explained what this is about? What is the company, and what exactly is being sold, and to whom? What do independent sources, not testimonials and not the company’s own materials, say about the income people typically earn? Is there urgency being applied, and if so, why?
The answers will not always be disqualifying. But the questions matter.
What comes next
This article is an introduction to the mechanics of MLM recruitment. In the pieces that follow, we will look at the specific structures and compensation models that make these organizations so difficult for regulators to address, the particular cases of companies operating in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, and what the evidence says about who actually makes money and who does not.
The pattern starts with a friendly message. Understanding that pattern is where we begin.
Sources
Groß, C. and Martin, H. (2023). MLM Explained: The facts about multi-level marketing, network marketing, and direct selling. Radboud University Nijmegen / Talented Ladies Club. https://hdl.handle.net/2066/290373
Groß, C. (2023). The psychology of attraction to multi-level marketing. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369772796_The_psychology_of_attraction_to_multi-level_marketing
The Private Therapy Clinic (n.d.). What is the psychology behind multi-level marketing?https://theprivatetherapyclinic.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-psychology-behind-multi-level-marketing/
Zeist.NU (2024). Jongeren in de val door piramidespel: overheid doet niets. https://www.zeist.nu/jongeren-in-de-val-door-piramidespel-overheid-doet-niets/
Omroep Brabant (2023). Omstreden ‘piramidespel’: minister moet ingrijpen vinden Kamerleden.
Autoriteit Financiële Markten (AFM). Correspondence with editorial team, 2024.
Rijksoverheid (2023). Kamerbrief over de handelspraktijken van de IM Academy.
Exit the Pyramid is an independent research and journalism platform investigating MLM structures, online recruitment tactics, and the regulation gap that allows them to operate. Founded in the Netherlands.
If you have a personal account or tip related to any of the organizations covered on this platform, you can reach us at info@exitthepyramid.org.
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