Running on Fumes

Even before the first media reports questioning the company, the small Irving staff of about five struggled to keep up with complaints from the exponentially growing ranks of distributors. Company policy dictates that complaints can only be submitted through the Back Office software as a "ticket"--never by phone or in person.

Most tickets were prompted by the fact that by March, the growth of the company had far outstripped the supply of pills coming from Mexico. A 14-day delivery "guarantee" was changed to 21 days, but still shipments fell behind. Distributors who paid their $499 to join and signed up for $59 "auto-ship" deliveries were billed regularly but got nothing in return, sometimes for months.

After criticism of the company began appearing in the media, some members sent tickets demanding answers from Mims and Romero. Others began reporting that their vehicles were getting worse mileage or breaking down altogether. In the days leading up to the government restraining order that shut down the company, up to 500 tickets a day were coming through the system, many of them angry demands for refunds. As of May 17, the day the Web site was taken down, BioPerformance members had submitted 18,548 complaints. Only 3,785 were answered.

Reading the increasingly desperate or irate tickets is a crash course in pyramid-scheme psychology. A distributor asks for advice on what to tell his downline who has seen her mileage get progressively worse: "She's wondering if maybe she's not putting enough product in her tank since it took a bigger drop. She's hoping so bad this will work and wondered if you had any suggestions..." A member in Ohio writes in after a report aired: "It looked really bad on the news! It made this company look like a scam. I believe in this product because it has worked for my family."

The most common complaint, however, is the supply shortage. The pleas are heart-rending: "You are ruining my business and it just isn't right! Every one of these people are beginning to think you (and me) are a scam. Do you know how hard it is to talk to these people everyday and assure them that this is a reputable business?" One distributor shows dawning awareness: "Lack of response to my open tickets further validates my suspicion that this company is not on the up-and-up."

One Dallas distributor (who did not want his name used because he is considering a lawsuit) built a team of more than 100 people and then found himself forced to explain seemingly arbitrary policy changes. "You tell all these people about the company, and then the company switches and leaves you holding the bag," he says. "You tell them what's in their literature, and they just change their literature." At first, payment was allowed by credit card, but soon people were asked to provide checking account numbers and, later, a backup account. "Some people were giving out their savings account numbers."

The former office employee says that working for BioPerformance shattered any illusions about MLMs. "I thought that these networking people just all followed each other around. I thought they were all like this little clique that kind of went from networking company to networking company, so I thought that they were all little scammers that would scam each other. But as I saw they were getting new people involved and as I was talking to people on the phone, there were people bursting into tears." Tired of the stress and guilt, the employee quit before the company was shut down. "I'm really, really upset with them right now, just what they've done to people. I just can't believe it. I trusted them fully."

Gaining the trust of strangers is easier when you're a minister. Lowell Mims certainly has the look of a TV evangelist with his shiny suits and impeccably coiffed hair. He also has a Web site for Lowell Mims Ministries that describes him as an "internationally known church growth evangelist." The site claims Mims has flown more than 4 million miles in 17 years, an average of 235,000 miles a year. The ministry has no physical address, and the phone number, which the Web site says is answered 24 hours a day, is in fact picked up by a malfunctioning answering machine. The site touts Mims' expertise in growing churches "numerically and financially," a skill set that overlaps considerably with his MLM activity.

Eric Scheibeler, a former pyramid scheme victim who now runs the anti-MLM Web site merchantsofdeception.com, says that MLMs commonly use religion to attract and motivate members. The best-known example, he says, is Quixtar (formerly Amway), where families have been known to hire cult counselors to extricate loved ones. Craig Lunde, a disgruntled BioPerformance member from California, says the fact that Mims was a minister influenced him to join. "Everyone seems to be so sincere and so honest and so Christian and so decent, and I went with that," Lunde says.