I understand that you want to be a little vague to protect your ex-boss's identity, but there's a big hole in this story that I'm hoping you can fill in a little. If they've been doing this MLM business for "a number of years", were promoted to "fairly higher up positions", had an office they rented to do their business out of, co-owned a vacation home, and you had heard they were making "crazy money", all back then, some number of years ago, after she left her good paying job leaving them with only her husband's income as a plumber, even though she had four children and they were "fairly heavily mortgaged"... but "currently", some number of years later, they are having financial struggles – what causes you to be so certain that this is all due to their involvement with this MLM company? It sounds like for the first few of this "some number" of years they were indeed doing pretty well.

Also, is your source of all this the person who claims his credit was damaged because the husband stopped making payments on the vacation home they co-owned? If so, have you gotten both sides of that story?

And finally, even if their current situation is somehow related to their MLM involvement... well, theirs is presumably one of tens- or hundreds of thousands of distributorships within this company, which is one of over 1,000 MLM companies – so why do you want to use their individual experience as a means to cause others considering MLM to "quickly think better of it"?

And just FYI... I joined an MLM in 2003 and didn't quit my job until 2005, when I was making enough from MLM to live on. In 2007, 08 and 09 my income was over $100,000 annually. Then it began to all fall apart in 2010 and was gone by 2012, due entirely to corporate mismanagement specific to this company, and nothing whatsoever to do with MLM.

So I guess I'm a little sensitive to such scenarios, and maybe I'm trying too hard to see it in this situation. I don't mean to. But if it might be at all similar (or, even if it's not), I'm not sure if it's fair to use your ex-boss's unfortunate experience to scare others away from opportunities that might work out well for them.