I think there is a difference, but I'm not sure if the difference matters. The cliche about how you can't cheat an honest man is true of most old school scams, they depend on the victim thinking they're taking advantage of the victimizer or of someone else. Card sharps are the former, more conventional pyramid schemes are the latter. MLM, like the social engineering feats behind a lot of big data breaches, are different; they depend on you naively doing what you think you're supposed to do. Of course if you want to be financially independent you become an entrepreneur, you're encouraged to worship heroic capitalists right and left, and here's an easy chance to become one of them! It's a con, but it's a different kind of con, and I'm not sure you can condemn it without condemning, say, the Silicon Valley startup scene, which victimizes people in nearly the same way as MLMs do, by letting them think there's a clear path to freedom if they just play the game right.