다단계판매조직의 성립요건에 관한 소고

Door-to-door Sales etc Act (DDSA) which stipulates door-to-door sales(DDS), phone soliciting sales, multi-level marketing (MLM), continuous transaction, and business soliciting transaction was fully revised in 2002. The revision focused on the reinforcement of the consumer indemnity system by introducing mutual aid cooperative. Although, consumer damages have continued in MLM industry. Consequently, KFTC has recently taken legal actions to the major door to door sales companies such as Amore Pacific, Woong-Jin in the charge of operating their business as MLM so the cases have been instituted suits. Most consumer damage cases since 2007 have been caused by DDS companies which substantially operates their business using MLM organization. It has to be clear constitutional requisites of MLM organization, allowing for this situation. Accordingly, I would like to state about constitutional requisites for MLM organization based on the precedents of Supreme Court and KFTC. The Supreme Court has quashed the original judgment as following reasons; MLM constitution prerequisites are membership of salesperson at multiple levels (requiring at least three levels of salespersons) and the provision of economic allowances (retail profit and support allowances). also the Supreme Court stated that people were induced to become salespersons through a share of retail profits and support allowances for product sales and the recruitment of salespersons, and because this same process was cumulatively repeated over three or more levels, such an organization MLM organization, even if the payment of support allowances was not affected by the sales quantities of lower- level salespersons not directly under oneself. This sentence as it called Hwang-Sam Nara Jurisdiction (2005-DO-977) made it clear in terms of the concept and elements of MLM as the first case after DDSA revision in 2002. Based on the Supreme Court decision, FTC made Guideline for Consumer Protection to regulate DDS company which operates their business as MLM. In addition, it has significant contribution to make the DDS companies, which substantially operates their sales organization as MLM, consumer indemnity insurancecontract. Major DDS companies have insisted that the constitutional requisites of MLM organization are insufficient in order to distinguish between MLM and DDS in current law. So they present that additional requisites, which are about recruitment, retail profit, and support allowance etc, have been added. However, these opinions are considered unreasonable and misinterpreted the DDSA Article 2 (5) and (7). MLM has been strictly regulated compared to DDS in recent DDSA, so many companies registered as DDS but they have operated their business as MLM substantially due to this. Additionally, these DDS companies neither make consumer indemnity insurance contacts nor get any regulations from government agency. Consequently, those companies have been caused consumer damage using pyramid scheme or illegal fund-raising business without any inspection. It is the key reason that the definition of MLM is relatively unclear in current DDSA so it is necessary to make it complete to regulate effectively.