Lissa Caltrider was in the middle of planning a scuba trip to Costa Rica and a weekend in Santa Monica—and thinking, “Boy, I wish I could make money doing this!”—when the Instagram ad from Fora popped up. And suddenly, it seemed, there was an easy and inexpensive way to make that happen.

“I’ve always loved traveling, and I was down the rabbit hole doing all the research when I saw the ad,” Caltrider says. “It seemed like a no-risk opportunity; it seemed too good to be true. But I have a business background, and I did a lot of research. I read up on MLMs and knew I didn’t want that. So I signed up with Fora. I did the onboarding and got an IATA number. And then I first really started to learn about this business.”