It’s an open secret that MLM nutritional supplements are marketed throughout Asia using all sorts of spectacular (and completely unfounded) health claims.

For the most part regulators aren’t interested and so long as money flows in, MLM companies themselves turn a blind eye.

It is in this regulatory environment and company culture that a woman believed she could treat her fever with Nu Skin juice.

Five days later she died of organ failure.

The woman, who went by the pseudonym Lin Li, signed up as a Nu Skin affiliate in 2016.

Her husband said Lin had been persuading family members and friends to use the company’s products and frequently engaged in promotional campaigns for the brand.

How much money (if any) Lin was making in Nu Skin is unclear. From the sounds of it though, she was trapped in your typical “internal consumption recruitment” racket.

As of 2017, Lin was reportedly ‘taking 16 pills and two packets of juice powder each morning.‘

According to Lin’s husband, Su, this behavior was encouraged by her Nu Skin upline, an individual surnamed Song.

Su said that after Lin joined Nu Skin, she began coming home late from work and neglecting their child.

He said she also started bringing home large quantities of Nu Skin products and consuming them.

When Lin refused to take their sick child to the hospital, Su said, it nearly broke up their marriage.

Lin said her mentor told her vaccines were poisonous and could harm (their) child.

In late February Lin came down with a fever. On the advice of her Nu Skin upline, she refused to go to hospital or take any medicine.

Instead she attempted to detox herself by only consuming Nu Skin juice.

Family members told Beijing Youth Daily that Song assured her the fevers were a sign of the body’s natural process of “detoxification,” and friends said Lin used to claim that the fevers actually made her feel healthier.

Lin subsequently died of a lung infection on March 2nd.

In the wake of Lin’s death, her Nu Skin upline and recruited downline broke contact.

Some even left the WeChat group Lin had created to promote Nu Skin products without so much as acknowledging her death.

Nu Skin itself did not acknowledge Lin’s death for seventeen days. And even then it was only after Lin’s death was widely reported and sparked public backlash.

In an official statement published earlier this week, Nu Skin stated ‘it has established a team to investgate the matter‘.

If our distributors are found to make misleading or exaggerating claims, the company will not avert its responsibilities.

Following Lin’s death, research by the Bejing Youth Daily has uncovered video footage of

Nu Skin salespersons openly proclaim(ing) to audiences that they can cure cancer.

The salespersons even tell their audiences not to go to the hospital when they get ill, urging them to “take Nu Skin products in double the quantity”.

Worse still, Lin’s upline Song is

still holding seminars to promote health supplements, which cite cases of “miraculous recoveries.”

During one such seminar, Song claimed that fevers would only get worse if treated at a hospital and could only be cured through Nu Skin’s pills.

Anyone want to take bets on how many affiliates Nu Skin has voluntarily terminated for making false and/or misleading health claims over the years?

Or even bothered to investigate why some of their affiliates are buying enough supplements each month to stock a pharmacy?

Oh well. Maybe Nu Skin can just pay another $540,000 fine and, like their brainwashing pyramid recruitment seminars, Chinese officials will sweep this one under the rug too.