Stephen Barrett

Stephen Barrett is a retired psychiatrist, author, co-founder of the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF), and the webmaster of Quackwatch. He focuses on consumer protection, medical ethics, and scientific scepticism. In 2020, Quackwatch became part of the Center for Inquiry; CFI will maintain its various websites and collections.

Roberta Blevins

Roberta Blevins is a former "Hun", who left the MLM world in 2017 and began publicly educating and speaking out against it. Since leaving, she has educated herself on the dangers associated with these organizations, from the financial to the psychological. She educates on social media, has been featured in multiple news and media including Amazon's LuLaRich and hosts the podcast Life After MLM, talking to the survivors and victims of commercial cults disguised as the quickest route to the American Dream. www.robertablevins.com

Stacie Bosley

Stacie Bosley is an economist with a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota. She is the Kahlert Professor of Economics at Hamline University, Minnesota. She has served as an expert witness for the FTC in pyramid scheme cases. Her work on MLMs has been published in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, the Journal of Financial Crime, the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics and Economic Inquiry.

Douglas M Brooks

Douglas M. Brooks is an attorney who has litigated class actions against MLM schemes, including Webster v. Omnitrition International, Inc., 779 F.3d 776 (9th Cir. 1996), cert. den., 519 U.S. 865 (1996), as well as cases against Herbalife, Nu Skin, Melaleuca and Consumers Buyline and others. He has also represented, pro bono, consumer advocates who have been sued by MLM companies and cults, including NXIVM v. Ross Institute, 364 F.3d 471 (2nd Cir. 2004), cert. den., 543 U.S. 1000 (2004). He was featured in the award winning documentary “Betting on Zero” in which he represented victims of the MLM Herbalife.

Michelle Carpenter

Michelle Carpenter is a full time Technology Business Liaison for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, KS, and a small business owner (Spoon Stop, LLC) who uses social media, website administration, organic marketing, and a loud mouth to advocate for change on behalf of victims of multi-level marketing scams like herself. Michelle has run Spoon Stop as an Etsy shop for several years now, but about six months after leaving her last MLM, she volunteered to house, develop, and organize a general public hub for information, resources, and tools pertaining to the FTC's 2022 ANPR on Unfair and Deceptive Earnings Claims. With assistance and feedback and input from more than 20 contributors, this was hosted and made available by Michelle in multiple languages at www.MLMchange.org. She plans to continue to use her platforms for this advocacy work; for more information visit www.spoonstop.com

Alanda Carter

Alanda Carter is an Instructional Design professional with a proven ability to design and develop innovative learning solutions supporting business objectives. After surviving breast cancer, Alanda faced professional uncertainty and was drawn to the multilevel marketing industry. Today, Alanda continues to support learning solutions by day and by night she analyzes multilevel marketing opportunities, interviews former distributors, and interviews a variety of experts on her popular YouTube channel.

Sarah Casteel

Sarah Casteel is a second year law student at Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Her interest in the anti-MLM movement is both personal, due to her own experiences and observations, and also academic and law-oriented. She is currently writing a journal note which explores legal and non-legal methods to address the harm caused by MLMs, including social media bans, private enforcement through litigation, Attorney General actions, financial sector liability for failure to report potential money laundering and fraud, and more.

Bruce Craig

Bruce Craig is an attorney retired from the Wisconsin Department of Justice after 30 years of service as Assistant Attorney General. His primary responsibility was as a litigating attorney in its Office of Consumer Protection, and his duties included a number of cases against pyramid schemes. He was also involved in anti-trust litigation and in the area of criminal appeals. He now lives in New York, and has been active on Seeking Alpha and other forums dealing with the subject of pyramid schemes.

Kathleen ‘Kati’ Daffan

Kati Daffan is an Assistant Director in the Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Marketing Practices.  Prior to stepping into this role, she litigated fraud cases in the division and advised former Chairwoman Edith Ramirez on consumer protection matters.  Kati has also worked at a civil rights law firm, at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, and as a law clerk to the Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York. 

Liz Day

Liz Day is a reporter and producer for The New York Times. Previously, she worked at the investigative reporting nonprofit ProPublica and at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where she produced the show’s in-depth segment on multilevel marketing and Herbalife.

Blye Pagon Faust

Blye is an Academy and Emmy Award-winning producer. Her credits include Spotlight, which was awarded Best Motion Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 2016 Academy Awards, and went on to gross nearly $100 million at the worldwide box office during its release. She most recently produced the hit Amazon docuseries LuLaRich. Other documentary credits include Emmy Award-winning and Peabody nominee Belly of the Beast and Emmy and Critic’s Choice Award nominee Rewind. In addition to her work as a producer, she is a ReFrame Rise sponsor and is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Mill Valley Film Festival's Mind the Gap: Women|Film|Tech initiative and the Creative Future Leadership Committee. Her board memberships have included The Center for Investigative Reporting, and she is a member of the Producers Guild of America and the State Bar of California. She received her J.D. from UCLA and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in English from Santa Clara University.

Robert Fitzpatrick

Robert L. FitzPatrick is the author of the books, Ponzinomics, the Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing, and False Profits. He is content producer of the consumer-education website, PyramidSchemeAlert.org. He has served as expert witness and consultant in more than 30 court cases involving multi-level marketing.

Deanna Grant-Smith

Deanna Grant-Smith, PhD is the Deputy Director of the QUT Centre for Decent Work and Industry based in the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research focussed on researching the potential for exploitation and exclusion presented by unpaid work and internships and the experiences of women participating in unwaged work and the MLM industry.

Claudia Groß

Claudia is an assistant professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, at the department for Organizational Design and Development. Her main interest is on how to design organizations that support ethical behaviour and how to ‘translate’ academic knowledge into better organizational practices. Since her PhD on the MLM industry in Germany, she is interested in and concerned about the manifold and widespread unethical practices in the industry. For further information see https://www.ru.nl/english/people/gross-c/.

Paul Hanna

Paul Hanna has thirty years investigative experience between the London Metropolitan Police Service, the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission and more recently Ireland’s Competition and Consumer Protection Commission which he joined in 2016 as its Deputy Director of Criminal Enforcement. He heads up the consumer crime unit where his role includes the management of criminal investigations into breaches of consumer protection legislation and leads a team of investigators engaged in proactive enforcement work.

Steven Hassan

Mental health professional, cult and undue influence expert Steven Hassan, PhD has been working in the field of religious and political cults for more than 40 years.  His expertise includes undue influence in cases of destructive one-on-one relationships, families, parental alienation, mini-cults, religious cults, therapy and self-improvement groups, professional abuse, institutional abuse, human trafficking, and hate and violent extremism.  The author of several books and peer reviewed published papers, his most recent book is “The Cult of Trump.” Dr. Hassan holds a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology from Cambridge College and a Doctorate in Organizational Development and Change from Fielding Graduate University School of Leadership Studies. He is a member of the Program in Psychiatry and the Law at Harvard Medical School.  For more information see https://freedomofmind.com

Monica Hayworth

Monica is a small business owner and anti-mlm advocate. After receiving her MBA she, like many others, had a lot of student loan debt. When she was approached by a Mary Kay rep she was told she could pay off her student loans. This would start her MLM journey that would turn into her advocacy today.

Jessica Hickson

Jessica Hickson is a military wife and mother of two young children who spent 5 years in a well-known MLM company. Being a military wife who accomplished the virtually unachievable goal of reaching the top 1% of the company, she has a unique perspective on the things that go on behind the scenes. She has valuable insight into recruitment methods, compensation plan comprehension, and manipulation tactics used by the top earners to ensure their steady paychecks. After enduring all that comes with that experience, as well as once being a large part of the problem, she now uses her own experience to educate others about the harmful nature and predatory practices within MLMs. 

Jason Jones

Jason Jones is an attorney and advocate for the victims of manipulation fraud. Jason wrote a popular website that exposed and discussed manipulative online scams, and was counsel on a multi year nationwide putative class action against Herbalife and forty of its top distributors for the deceptive manner in which they operated their live event system. Jason is currently an Assistant Attorney General at the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia where he works on antifraud and workers’ rights cases.

William Keep

William W. Keep, PhD is a professor of marketing and former dean of business and interim provost at The College of New Jersey. He has assisted state and federal prosecutors in the prosecution of pyramid schemes and has been quoted in the press (The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg/ BusinessWeek, Financial Times, New York Times, Forbes, etc.) as an expert on multilevel marketing. With Dr. Peter Vander Nat (senior economics, FTC, retired), Dr. Keep published academic articles on multilevel marketing, pyramid schemes, and the evolution of direct selling in the United States.

Janja Lalich

Janja Lalich, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Sociology, is an international authority on cults and coercion. Researcher, author, and educator, she specializes in recruitment, indoctrination, and coercive methods of influence and control. Dr. Lalich is the author and/or coauthor of six books, including the now classic, Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships. In addition to working with survivors and their families, she leads workshops and educational sessions for government agencies, international intelligence agencies, private companies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and leads online psychoeducational courses for trauma survivors, families, and mental-health professionals. She has also served as expert witness in civil and criminal legal cases. Dr. Lalich may be reached at drlalich@sbcglobal.net or through her website, www.janjalalich.com.

Taylor Leigh

Taylor Leigh began investigating the multi-level marketing industry after almost joining an MLM company herself. For the last two years, she’s been analyzing and educating the public about the MLM industry on her YouTube channel The Antibot. Taylor’s channel focuses on investigating specific companies, responding to MLM proponents, and studying the intersection between the MLM industry and religion.

Savy Leiser

Savy Leiser is a Chicago author, small business owner, and the creator of the YouTube channel Savy Writes Books. After starting a book and toy business in 2017, Savy felt many MLMs were taking up resources in the small business world and exploiting women with entrepreneurial goals. She started speaking out against MLMs on YouTube in 2019 and continues to almost every week on her channel and her live morning show, Your Morning Guru.

Elaine Linga

Elaine Linga is the creator of Invested Lifestyle, a YouTube Channel with a mission to teach financial literacy and advocate for ethical business practices. Originally from the Philippines, she migrated to the United States of America in 2013, working as a government analyst and obtained her Master's degree in Public Administration. She witnessed her fellow Filipinos, loved ones and her family fall for trust-based scams and decided to research and educate herself about them. Now she is passionate about investing and teaching others how to invest and avoid scams or commercial cults.

Dariusz Łomowski

Director at the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) – Branch Bureau in Gdansk, Poland. Nearly twenty years ago Dariusz started at the Office’s media relations unit, later gained experience at product safety area and consumer law enforcement. For last three years he focuses on the market practices at consumer finances and alternative investments, including pyramid promotional schemes (at all their varieties and notorieties). He is attorney-at-law and a board member of the Legal Clinic Foundation – non-governmental organisation setting standards for 27 legal clinics in Poland.

Hannah Martin

Hannah Martin is the founder of Talented Ladies Club, an online magazine and training portal for ambitious women. She's an award-winning copywriter with over 23 years' experience working for some of the world's top ad agencies and brands, and is a qualified psychotherapist, hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner. Hannah has been investigating and publishing articles on the MLM industry since 2017.

D. Anthony Miles

D. Anthony Miles, PhD is a nationally known Startup and Marketing expert. He is a serial entrepreneur, an award-winning researcher, award-winning professor, statistician, legal expert witness, business expert, and bestselling author. Dr. Miles has been featured on numerous nationally syndicated media. He is also a forensic marketing expert. He has conducted research on multilevel marketing for over 15 years.

Josie Naikoi

Josie Naikoi is a former member of multi-level marketing and was in the top 1% of the industry for over 5 years. After witnessing rampant predatory behavior, Josie exited the MLM industry in 2019. Once the pandemic happened, Josie felt the need to warn others about what she saw behind the scenes of multi-level marketing by posting a video on her YouTube channel in May of 2020. That video, Why I Quit The MLM Industry At The Top, now has one million views and Josie has made it a point to interview other victims of commercial cults. Today, Josie creates documentaries on scams and cults to educate the public about undue influence and tactics that predatory companies and organizations use to gain and manipulate a person's trust.

Máire O Sullivan

Lecturing at Munster Technological University in Ireland, Dr. Máire O Sullivan's research is focused on female consumer behaviour. She has written for The Conversation on the anti-MLM movement and researched MLM advertising targeting women in particular. Her PhD is from University College Cork. More information can be found at maireosullivan.com.

Bonnie Patten

Bonnie Patten is Executive Director of Truth in Advertising (TINA.org), a non-profit consumer advocacy organization focused on protecting consumers from false and deceptive marketing. Since its inception, TINA.org has filed more than 250 legal actions, and state and federal agencies have used its work in at least three pyramid scheme cases. Ms. Patten has testified before Congress on issues related to consumer protection, deceptive marketing and economic justice, and she is a regular commentator in the media including appearances on NBC, CBS, ABC, and BBC, in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Economist, and on podcasts such as The Dream. She is the 2019 recipient of the Florence Kelley Consumer Leadership Award by the National Consumers League. She earned her J.D. from Boston University and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Eric Scheibeler

Eric Scheibler is a former Federal auditor for the Dept. of Energy. He was a high level leader and spent a decade in a MLM motivational organization, travelling and recruiting in the US, South America and the Philippines. He is the author of the book "Merchants of Deception" and appeared on Dateline NBC's investigative show into MLM fraud.

Peter Vander Nat

Peter J. Vander Nat, Ph.D. (University of Notre Dame) served for 15+ years as senior economic expert at the FTC regarding pyramid schemes and has submitted numerous declarations to federal courts. Along with co-author Dr. Bill Keep, he has published articles on pyramid schemes vs. legitimate multilevel marketing. Upon retiring from the FTC in 2014, he remains an active expert witness for government prosecution of pyramid schemes.

Dave Vaughan

Dave Vaughan is an English Language Arts teacher for middle school students in Taiwan. Following the surprising end to a relationship, Dave became familiar with the systems of control and manipulation within MLM teams in across Taiwan. Applying his background and research in economics, Dave now produces content for social media creators in the hopes of making the problems of MLM more deeply understood for both regulators and prospective recruits.

Elizabeth Villagomez

Elizabeth Villagomez, PhD is an economist that has researched MLMs from a gender perspective. She has worked for UN entities as global and regional adviser on women's economic empowerment as well as an international consultant. She has also worked extensively for the EU Commission and Parliament, and the European Institute for Gender Equality on employment, social inclusion, gender equality, and discrimination.