What happens when your (required) Facebook account gets disabled for no communicated reason, boom you now own a $500 piece of 'artwork' with no functionality.

"New York is the center of the world"

Oh dear, that little dot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean will be most disappointed....

Not to mention those who became participants only to access the product at a wholesale price and have zero interest in "business building". I know my mother did exactly that when we were kids as a price saving option for some A*way products we used in the house.

and herein lies the crux of the problem, an MLM that suggest getting rich quick is not acting in the best interest of the people it claims to serve.. Professional Networkers will tell you that doing this properly *is* hard work and *does* take time...

Because making a profit from marking up a product, and paying commissions (or finders fee) is not illegal I'm guessing...

Generalisations are never a good thing, looking at MLM purely from a business model perspective, if it is done 'correctly' there is nothing wrong, it's when bad actors get involved who don't know the rules, (or chose to flout the rules veema.

Not just the USA, this product was being sold in Australia too.

I'll probably cop some flack for this but blaming MLM for this is the wrong target, there are bad actors in all business models, painting *all* MLM because of the action of this company seems a little excessive.

The newly elected (Sep 2013) Australian Government no longer has a Science Minister.

I was told by a ham radio operator back in the day that a radio setup is only ever as good as its antenna system (and that includes the coax and feedline) to me this simply sounds like they finally listened to the old man in the crew.