When Someone Asks You to Join Their Team

The message, and why it lands

It usually arrives from someone you know. Someone a year above you, or a cousin, or a person you have not spoken to since middle school.

The words are always warm. An opportunity. A team. A mentor. They saw something in you.

Then somewhere in there is a monthly fee, a starter pack, or a subscription. That is the moment worth slowing down for.

Here is the test, and it fits in one line. If you pay before you earn, you are the customer.

What is actually being sold

In this kind of business, two things get sold at once.

There is a product. Lessons, drinks, leggings, trading signals, whatever it is.

And there is the chance to sell it, which is sold to you. That second one is where the money comes from, and it is the reason you were messaged rather than someone's aunt.

You are being recruited as a buyer who then recruits other buyers.

The case that was about people your age

The federal trade regulator, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), polices unfair and deceptive selling. In May 2025 the FTC and the state of Nevada sued an online training company that charged a monthly subscription.

The complaint says the company took over 1.2 billion dollars since 2018. Subscriptions ran up to 400 dollars a month.

The complaint also puts the targeting in plain words. The operation "deliberately focused on marketing to young people, including through posts to college social media pages."

Read that again. Not by accident. Deliberately.

Two numbers from the same case tell you how it went for the people who joined. Sixty percent of customers stopped paying within one month. Ninety percent dropped out within six.

The case settled in May 2026 with a judgment of 795.8 million dollars against the lead defendants, and nearly 90 million dollars in assets handed over.

The wider picture, stated carefully

One case can be an outlier. So here is the broader figure, in the exact shape the agency put it.

Staff at the FTC reviewed the income disclosure statements published by 70 multi-level marketing companies. They found that many participants received no payments at all, and that the vast majority received 1,000 dollars or less per year.

Note what that does and does not say. It does not say everyone loses. It says most people in it make very little, and it comes from the companies' own published papers.

That is the number to hold next to any monthly income you get shown.

One more thing you may run into. Some pages say a new rule now makes these companies prove the incomes they advertise. In January 2025 the agency proposed a rule like that. A proposal is not law. This one has not become law, and it may not.

The money question you can ask today

Before any of the bigger arguments, there is a small practical one.

Ask how the money reaches you. Not the yearly figure. The path.

At your age that path is usually blocked or has to run through an adult's account. The teen version of the payment app you already have cannot take money for selling things at all, in the company's own words below. Somebody who has thought this through will have an answer. Somebody repeating a script will not.

Saying no to a person, not to a company

This is the actual difficulty, and pretending otherwise is useless.

Turning down an ad is easy. Turning down someone from school who is being nice to you is not.

Three things that help.

1. Do not decide in the chat. "I will think about it" is a complete answer. Pressure to sign up today is not urgency. It is the design.
2. Show it to an adult before you reply. Not to be told what to do. So that somebody else has read the same words while not being flattered by them.
3. Keep your no short. Long explanations are an invitation to argue. Short ones are not rude, they are just finished.

If it is already happening at your school

These things spread through a year group fast, because every person who joins is told to bring in more people.

You do not have to be the person who argues about it. You do have to be the person who does not pay in.

And if a friend has already spent money, the useful thing is not to say you told them. It is to sit next to them while they cancel it.