John Oliver showed the disclosure of the company about the claims about earnings, the one about the average distributor making less than $10. That's a company disclosure. The company is not the one doing the misleading. If it happens, it happens at the distributor level.

There are people making money from their distribution business. Those people aren't necessarily making claims either, but people see that and think they can emulate it. It's very similar to looking at someone with a successful blog or youtube channel and thinking they can emulate it.

There's always social pressure on people to spend money they don't have. You would have to eliminate advertising to do away with that. Those people who are saying that they spent thousands of dollars got actual products that they can't resell. But they did buy actual products.

My question is, how would you regulate this industry without affecting any other industry? The government has been making attempts for a long time.

The only unique thing about an MLM company is that they allow distributors to purchase and resell product on a very small scale. It might be possible to put more regulations on distributors, but as you've seen, they're not the most knowledgeable. Putting more regulations on them would just be more burdensome to the people you're trying to protect.

Keep in mind that if you eliminated this multi-billion dollar industry, you'd be eliminating a lot of people's livelihoods for the people who are successful at it.

John Oliver's solution is to tell people not to join it. MLMs have a bad enough reputation in his demographic audience that I doubt that the people watching it will be changed in their position. I looked at the comments yesterday and was surprised to not see it filled with people giving their experience of losing money. I looked at it today, and there's a bit more of that. He's not saying anything new to his demographic audience.

The reason I replied to this OP was because not only does his solution seem ineffective, he also created misleading information about the industry in his attempt to mock it. Neither helps clean up the industry.