Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Please Read This...
What I am going to talk about is something I believe that has happened to a lot of people. It happened to me a few months back and has affected my life and attitudes towards life greatly since then. Due to what happened I had to live a very hard and bitter life for a few months. I am now writing this so that people can read about it and learn from my mistakes. And hopefully to discourage anyone who has such intention from doing it. When I talked to my friends about network marketing, I realised that those in the field use the same few tricks always. Why I did not bring this up until now is because during the meantime, I was busy earning money to return my friend who was kind enough to actually lend me 1000 bucks back then. I did not want to mention this to anyone until I have officially clear the debts.
In February, a friend of mine named Andy called me up and claimed that he wanted to have lunch with me. In fact, when I think about it now I realised he must had been slowly trying to get me out and planning for it all these while. In the first place we were not very close with each other, all I knew was that he wanted to redo his A level and I offered to help him. That's when we started contacting each other more often. I really did not suspect anything back then. Once he mentioned to me that he had this friend who helped him out a lot with some problems in life and he really wanted to thank him by bringing me to a restaurant he had opened at Clark Quay one day. Actually I feel weird going out with people that I do not know very well but nevertheless, since Andy was from Taiwan just like me and he sounded genuine, I decided to just help him out. After receiving another call from him one day, I agreed to go to the restaurant. That afternoon I went down to Raffles Place and waited for about 45 minutes for him. When he finally appeared, he apologised to me for being late but I was still very pissed though I did not show it. So he immediately brought me to a Kopitiam. In my heart I was thinking out loud "I thought it's a restaurant?" And he told me his friend was coming to join us. So his friend came and started talking to me about what I want to achieve in life etc. He told me that there were people at my age earning big bucks and stuff and started telling me about network marketing. I immediately realised that this was not right. If only I had heard about such cases earlier from my friends I would not have fell for it back then. Andy's friend invited me to their company to have a better understanding and though I was really very angry at that point of time, I did not want to put my friend in a difficult position and so I agreed. We went to the company which is named Enyouth and I was introduced to the people there and stuff. Me together with some other people who happened to have been invited there that day attended a talk by a senior later on. I was very skeptical but the people there were just too good with their words and they managed to arrange another session with me another day. They told me not to discuss this with anybody. After the whole incident when I think about it I realised the reason. It's because everyone around me would have told me about the dark sides of network marketing. But I was stupid enough to follow what they said. I turned up for the 2nd session and they started persuading me to join. I asked Andy did I have to pay anything or buy any products to start working there like what I had read from the papers and he said to me no. So I decided to give it a try. Then they started to tell me that in their company, all the staff bought the products for their family members as it's really worth it and only when my family actually benefit from it would I be able to convince my future clients from the bottom of my heart as I would have experienced its magic. I kept refusing to buy because I told them I did not have much money and they actually asked me to borrow from my friends! They literally spent hours convincing me and when I tried to leave to attend another appointment with my friend they even asked me to postpone it. I felt very awkward but I did not know what to do. I should have just left then but I thought that would put Andy in a difficult position again. They continued to persuade me and it lasted from about 4pm to 11pm. I am not kidding, they were just that persistent. They told me that they were having a buy-one-get-one-free promotion and the company could help me sell the other one to cover my own. I must mention this guy's name, he's Winghong. In the end he followed me all the way to a ATM machine to withdraw 1000 bucks and he offered to pay the rest 575 bucks for me first. Stupidly I handed him 1000 bucks cum 75 bucks for registration to become a distributor in Singapore while he paid 575 bucks for me. He started asking me to return him the money the very next day though. I had told them I would consider about joining the company during my upcoming Thailand trip but they insisted that I join the company then. After I came back from Thailand, they became unresponsive to my messages and ignored my enquiry about my the other product that I got for free from the promotion. I think one reason was that they realised that I was not very interested in bringing down any of my friends to the company to introduce them to the products and persuade them to join the company. I would never do the same thing to my friends that Andy did to me. What's more I did not receive the commission that I was supposed to receive for buying the product as a distributor. I don't want to describe the details but after many days of emotional struggle I decided to cut ties totally with those guys and forget about the whole thing as I believed that there's no way I can get back my money and most likely they have eaten up my the other product. I wanted to just take it as a lesson though the price is a bit too high. 1.5k resulted in my hard life for the next few months as I normally give my mom 500 bucks every month and since I do not want my family to know about this incident, I continued giving my mom 500 bucks every month when I had almost no money for myself at all. Luckily a friend lend me 1000 bucks which helped me tide through that few months. After working for 2 months I managed to return him all the money and therefore I decided to put up my story now to warn everyone.
First of all I wanna clarify that this is not against network marketing. This is just to warn those people out there who are unaware of the tatics that some of these people use to recruit new members like how I was recruited. I found out from many of my friends that they had been invited to lunch by friends that they had lost contact for quite some time or were simply just not close just like what happened to me and in the end it's about network marketing too. Like what my friends said, if you wanna do network marketing, you should just tell your friends the truth, by doing all those tricks, you would lose a lot of friends. It's true, some of my friends told their friends off in their faces once they bring up their products during the lunch or lead them to the company. I cannot bring myself to be that crude, I simply deleted all those people's contacts from my phones and friendster without informing them anything. I would just pretend that I never had such friends. In fact, this is the only case I have experienced. But it has changed my character since. I am now very skeptical about everything I see or hear, be it from the newspapers' classified sections or from my friends. Take note these 2 names, Andy and especially Winghong. And thanks dude for lending me that 1000 bucks... I end my story here, anyone who has the same experience please leave a comment. Everyone just leave some comment, I think this is worth discussing.
My mind's unweaving / 8:15 PM
