Thousands of Women Say LuLaRoe’s Legging Empire Is a Scam

Roberta Blevins likes to talk to strangers. If you’re next to her on an airplane or behind her at the grocery checkout, she’ll notice something about you that she finds interesting and ask you about it. “I’ll be like, ‘Oh, you’re buying apples? I love apples! What’s your favorite kind?’ ” she says. “My husband makes fun of me for it, but it’s like, ‘Sorry I’m so friendly, OK?’ ”

Blevins is 37 and lives with her husband and two kids in Alpine, Calif., a suburb of San Diego. Her chattiness is what led her, in October 2015, to ask a woman she knew through a motherhood-themed Facebook group about the leggings she was advertising online. “I was like, ‘What’s LuLaRoe? I’ve never heard of this company,’ ” Blevins says. The woman explained that she bought clothes wholesale from LuLaRoe and then sold them at roughly double the price. It was a multilevel marketing company, or MLM, sometimes called direct selling. Perhaps she’d heard of the most successful examples: Amway, Herbalife, or Mary Kay?