• 1, Call their customer service hotline. Request a refund.

• 2, Their customer service representatives are trained to tell you that refunds are not allowed. Request to escalate your refund request to a decisionmaker. State that disallowing refunds within a reasonable timeframe is illegal under the Consumer Protection Act. I base this claim on this source, but I welcome any legal professionals here to correct me.

• 3, State that you will be formally submitting a legal claim against the MLM company with the Tribunal for Consumer Claims of Malaysia (Tribunal Tuntutan Pengguna Malaysia, TTPN) if the decisionmaker/management disallows your refund request.

• 4, If they disallow your refund request, create an account with TTPN here and submit your claim. If they decide to allow your refund request, follow their instructions, but submit a claim anyway.

I deleted my claim via the TTPN website only after I had my money back in the bank. It took 3 months.

I also had to cover return shipping of the products, but it was <10% what my mother spent on the purchase, so it was worth it.

MLMs in Malaysia tend to label themselves “direct selling” schemes in order to sidestep the negative effects of the term “multi-level marketing”, but make no mistake, they operate on the same principles. They sell overpriced, shit-quality products to the young, naïve and easily trusting. They seduce victims with mathematically improbable get-rich-quick schemes, where the primary profit model is not based on selling, but on recruiting greater fools that pay exorbitant sign-up membership fees. It is profoundly tragic that our country has not banned them outright, and I hope our lawmakers do something about it.

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My mother was a victim for over 8 years. She was a registered Beauty Consultant with Mary Kay. I was only made aware of this when I returned home bc of COVID19, and received a Mary Kay delivery in the mail.

I spent an insane amount of time explaining to her why Mary Kay and MLMs were bullshit. She would not listen. I think there are two reasons here:

• 1, She’d fallen under the classic MLM trap of feeling loyal to her referrer (the person who referred her into the MLM), because my mother viewed her referrer as a personal friend. This honeypot tactic is so so so common, and can make people incredibly resistant towards viewing themselves as victims. They don’t want to believe their “friends” scammed them, and they don’t want to admit they were naïve enough to fall for it.

• 2, She believed that when the MLM ran stupid 50% off / 70% off / Buy One Free One deals, she was actually getting products at a very good price.

In the end, what made my mother change her mind was searching up the exact Mary Kay products she had bought on Google, Lazada and Shopee, and showing her how she could buy those exact same products at 75% less than the DISCOUNTED PRICE she had originally bought those products from Mary Kay for.

I bring this up just to emphasise — my mother’s own child explaining MLMs to her in detail for over 8h did not change her mind. This hurt. What convinced my mother was not me, but Google/Lazada/Shopee. If you are trying to protect a loved one from MLM predation and they don’t listen to you, it will hurt. But what may work is showing them external sources. Show them how the same product can be acquired for ridiculously cheap on Google/Lazada/Shopee, and show them how competitor products are by far more value for money — dollar for dollar, you can buy far better skincare products from literally any other non-MLM company.

At the end of this 4-month-long struggle, I only manage to get back the money from the most recent purchase my mother made, on top of extricating a promise from my mother never to interact with Mary Kay again. My family is financially struggling, and we will never recover the exorbitant fees she paid to register as a Beauty Consultant, nor the money she paid over the years to purchase from Mary Kay.

I did not pursue the monies she paid over the past 8 years, because based upon a close reading of the Consumer Protection Act 1999 Amendment 2019 here, specifically PART VI. RIGHTS AGAINST SUPPLIERS IN RESPECT OF GUARANTEES IN THE SUPPLY OF GOODS, I do not know if it is possible to get a refund for financial transactions that happened so far in the past. Especially when my mother had already used those products. Especially when direct selling is still legal in this country.

I hope this helps someone else. Multi-Level Marketing / Direct Selling / Direct Sales companies will always tell you that refunds are impossible, but they are lying, and disallowing refunds is illegal. Know your rights, protect your loved ones, and hold these predatory companies accountable.