USANA - scam or not?

There's an all out war against USANA by Barry Minkow... an ex con whose story would make a heck of a movie or book from what I read about him at en.Wikipedia.com. The scams he pulled to keep a fraudlent carpet cleaning business afloat are nearly as funny as they are devious and unscrupulous. Mr. Minkow even had ties to the Genovese crime family... and even worse in my mind are ties with white separatists. He now says through his time in prison, adoption of Christianity, and earning degrees in religion, he has completed a personal transformation, and now battles fraud.

Now what I haven't found in my research is why Minkow has chosen to pick on USANA vs. the hundreds of other MLM's and the handful of publicly traded ones?

What seems apparent though is that Barry Minkow is a master at manipulation of facts, figures and concepts. This post would have to be several pages long to go through each of his USANA accusations... and I won't do that because as I've checked out his YouTube videos, and his "FDI" site (boy does that sound like FBI... and thus my feeling that he manipulates sounds too to create the right effect... as in "they're being investigated by the FDI" could be mis-understood, and indeed there was a Forbes article saying USANA was being investigated by the FBI... which appears to NOT be true - yikes) because it appears Mr. Minkow's attacks on USANA are attacks on the MLM industry in general with only one of two specifics of USANA's pay structure.

So... I'm going to call USANA - "legit". While I don't like the idea of selling multiple business centers to people who don't even know if they can build one, as USANA apparently does, their overall structure and pay plan is technically legal.

Now if you are anti-MLM, then you would be on Barry Minkow's side. If you believe that there are good applications of the Network Marketing model (which I believe - it's just that there are many more that are poor applications at best, or outright scams at worst), then this one takes further investigation. The bottom line is that as a publically traded company, USANA is one of the most scrutinized MLM's in the world. So if you are an MLM supporter.... Barry Minkow is not the guy you want poking around your MLM, because he'll find everything wrong with it since he finds everything about MLM's to be wrong.

For one take on whether or not MLM's are all illegal, or whether some are legit check out this post. One example is Barry Minkow's statement that the top 3% of USANA make 87% of commissions. Well, this isn't far off from the U.S. distribution of wealth... the top 1% have about 33%... and the bottom 80% has only 18%. I also have two additional problems with the USANA numbers:

1. MLM's attract and lose a lot of new distributors... a high percentage of people who have no business trying to start a business. Network Marketing sounds easy... it turns out to be hard... those who would have succeeded in other businesses too are most likely to rise to the top... top 3% in this instance

2. Customers are often counted as distributors. When an MLM offers a distributor fee to get access to "wholesale prices" you'll get people who just want to buy the product for cheaper counted among the "failing" distributors.

For USANA... I don't know the company well... but I'm calling this one legit... with a few things about the pay plan that I don't like. Barry Minkow... he's a heck of a sales guy... I'll give him that.