The FTC announced in April 2026 that the operators of multilevel marketing company Forever Living will be permanently prohibited from making deceptive earnings claims, resolving allegations that the company deceived consumers into believing they could earn meaningful, sustained profits from the venture.DOCUMENTED
Named in the FTC's complaint are Forever Living Products International LLC, CEO Gregg Maughan, President Aidan O'Hare, and the affiliated entity Forever Living.com LLC — a structure naming both the corporate entity and its senior individual leadership, a choice that typically signals the FTC viewed the deceptive practices as directed from the top rather than as the isolated conduct of lower-level sales participants.DOCUMENTED
- Participants, marketed under the branded title "Forever Business Owners" (FBOs), were recruited with promises of income from selling health and wellness products and from recruiting further participants into the program.
- According to the FTC, in each of the last five years at least 77% of FBOs who purchased, sold, or recruited received no compensation whatsoever — more than three-quarters of actively participating members earning literally nothing.
- More than 89% of new participants had not recouped their initial startup cost of $300 or more, even after two full years of participation in the program.
- The settlement requires the company to substantiate any future earnings claims upon consumer request and bars misrepresenting the likelihood of recruiting a further "downline" of additional participants.
- The order is permanent, with no expiration date specified in the FTC's announcement, meaning the earnings-claim restrictions apply indefinitely to the named defendants.
The arithmetic behind the ban
The FTC's own figures are the clearest evidence in this case: if more than three-quarters of participants who actively tried to sell products or recruit new members made nothing in a typical year, and nearly nine in ten new participants had not even recovered their initial investment after two full years, the earnings claims used to recruit them could not have reflected a typical or even a common outcome — only, at best, a rare exception being presented as the norm.DOCUMENTED
Deceptive earnings claims do not just mislead workers — they divert workers away from genuine, income-generating jobs.
That statement, attributed to the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection director in the agency's announcement, frames the harm in terms that extend beyond the immediate financial loss of the startup cost: time and effort spent pursuing a described opportunity that statistically will not pay off is time not spent pursuing alternatives — a conventional job, a different business venture, further education — that might have produced real, verifiable income for the same hours invested.DOCUMENTED
How multilevel marketing structures obscure this arithmetic
Multilevel marketing structures are particularly effective at obscuring the underlying statistics from prospective recruits, because a recruit typically hears directly from the small minority of participants who did succeed — the company's own top earners, who are naturally the most visible and vocal advocates for the opportunity — rather than encountering aggregate participation data of the kind the FTC's complaint relies on. This case is one of several MLM-earnings-claims actions the FTC has pursued in the same general period, alongside separate actions against individual senior participants in other multilevel marketing companies accused of using similarly unsubstantiated earnings claims to recruit new members.
Sources behind this report
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