QUITE recently, I met a master's degree holder who had lost over $60,000 in his multi-level marketing (MLM) edu-preneur business.

When he told me that he had willingly parted with his hard-earned cash because he was promised high monthly returns, I wasn't all that surprised.

You won't be reading that story because my paper decided not to publish the article.

But I have had my share of unwise pursuits, too, and I don't mind sharing.

A few years ago, a close friend and I decided to hawk expensive multi- vitamins and skincare brands produced by a perfectly legitimate health-care company. I cannot remember what returns we thought we would get - we were mainly drawn to the excitement of setting up our own business.

Our uplines - the distributors of the MLM organisation that recruited us - would earn a commission based on our sales efforts, and we, in turn, had to find our own downlines to market the company's products. The downlines' job was to market the products to consumers by means of relationship referrals and direct selling.

I would later find out that my product was harder to sell than I thought.

The star attraction, we were told ad infinitum, was a patented machine invented by the health-care company. It could measure antioxidant levels in our bodies by non-invasive methods.

It was going to be the next big thing. If the impressive PowerPoint presentations were anything to go by, it was slated to make waves in the health-care industry.

The then-popular reasoning was: Antioxidants determined how healthy one was, so why wouldn't everybody want to know their antioxidant count?

And because of the patent, everyone would have to approach the company to use the machine. It would mean money.

What's more, should we get into the hall of fame, we'd be going to Salt Lake City in Utah for a grand convocation.

So, we anticipated the arrival to Singapore of the much-raved machine.

In the meantime, our uplines fed us encouragement and made us brush up our sales pitch at least twice a week.

But we didn't last three months in the business, which cost our upline (he was kind enough to extend a loan to us poor undergraduates) about a grand or so.

It certainly didn't help that there were other MLM groups that had smeared the products' reputation with unsavoury sales tactics.

But we also quit because of other reasons. It wasn't just because we were unable to meet the monthly sales targets to cover costs, or that it was impossible to find another downline with a thousand dollars to blow on multi-vitamins.

Rather, I partly have the antioxidant machine to thank.

When it finally arrived, long queues formed at the hotel where hordes of excited direct sellers had congregated, dying to know what their antioxidant reading was.

Now, these people had also been consuming the company's multi-vitamins every day, so they ought to boast the highest antioxidant readings.

On the other hand, I had been skivving off my pills regimen because I simply could not afford them.

Yet my reading far exceeded my condo-living, Benz-driving uplines, whom I have not seen since the day I left.

As I fled the hotel on my own, leaving behind the speakers who were giving talks on "growing seeds of success", it hit me that I had almost been bought over by the machine, but that was not what the company was trying to sell me.

Be it health-care equipment, investment packages or magnetic beds, any business involving something you had to buy on faith is really trying to sell you dogma, and the most deceptive one of all, is "you are what you earn". And that was something I wasn't ready to buy.

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