Slashdot Mirror
Ponzi Schemes Multiply On YouTube
Hugh Pickens writes "While it's probably not true that P. T. Barnum was the originator of the saying 'there's a sucker born every minute,' the proliferation of nearly 23,000 Ponzi schemes on YouTube, with an astounding 59,192,963 views, proves that the sentiment is still alive and well. The videos usually don't ask for money directly, but send viewers to web sites where they are urged to sign up for the 'gifting program,' usually for fees ranging from $150 to $5,000. One of the videos recently added on YouTube featured Bible quotes, pictures of stacks of money and a testimonial from a man who said he not only got rich from cash gifting, but also found true happiness and lost 35 pounds. 'They make it seem like it's legal and an easy way to make money, but it's nothing more than a pyramid scheme,' says Better Business Bureau spokeswoman Alison Southwick. Some of the videos claim that because it's 'gifting,' it's somehow legal. 'They talk about "cash leveraging," whatever that means, and other vague marketing talk,' says Southwick, but the basic scheme is that participants are told to recruit more people who will put in more money. 'It's just money changing hands,' says Southwick, 'and it always goes to people at the top of the pyramid.' A spokesman for YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., said the company doesn't comment on individual videos."
Just as the government learned it by watching Ponzi, these youtubers learned it by watching the government.
"His name was James Damore."
...this is precisely why we really need to reconsider our public schooling system.
If we abolish forced schooling, and insist that people "educate themselves" They'll find one of these scams, get taken for an expensive ride, and then left dumbfounded as to what happened.
Solid critical thinking skills start with a decent education. Decent education starts by making it free, neutral and accessible.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Just like during the Great Depression, this will be a time of resurgent con-men as the majority will (in desperation) try anything to get cash.
The notion that you can "gift" (or "buy") your way to being rich without doing any hard work, or having a creative idea, is so completely stupid that anyone who believes it, assuming they're in full control of their mental faculties, deserves what they get.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
You'd be surprised how quickly a sucker learns after his money is gone forever. Sounds like a cheap education to me.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You'd be surprised how many people fall for one of these schemes, then move on to the next, lose out, and move on to the next to lose out again...
Why should it be illegal to play pyramid schemes? Just because people are stupid enough to fall for them? I have no sympathy for people who are lured in by promises that are quite bluntly too good to be true, where thinking about it for only a minute would give you enough reasons to stay away from it.
Libertarian intellectualism at its finest. Why don't we just scrap all the laws and let people fuck each other over every way imaginable? People do stupid things, laws try to prevent and minimize the harm done by those actions.
Want to see an economy tank all we need is a couple million illiterate people come of working age.
No, it sounds like the most expensive, yet useless education ever devised. You lose a lot of money, and you learn one way NOT to lose your money, when it's far too late.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
ok. Follow me here. This is real simple, but 300 million Americans keep missing it.
I need some money in order to facilitate a transaction... How do I create that money?
I go to a bank (the FED) and borrow $100 from them. The FED creates new money (credit) and loans it to me at 5%. (Did you see the pea in the shell game? It was right there. Cos millions keep missing it)
Right, so there is only $100 of credit in existence but now I owe them $105.
1 year later I'm a bit stuck because I've paid off most of the loan to the FED but that last $5 is a real bitch because it just doesn't exist. So what do I do?
I need some money, so I go to a bank (the FED) and borrow some more money from them. The FED creates that new money and loans it to me. Great! I can pay that $5 which didn't exist. But wait, I now need to pay off interest on the new load. lather, rinse, repeat.
That's money. The debt has to keep growing, or the system collapses. Growth. Growth. Must have growth. A Ponzi scheme of epic proportions. Hey, maybe you can talk some bums on the streets to take out some loans for a couple of McMansions. Then everything will be all right.
That's money. The government created it that way, and can change it as required. Don't you think they share some of the blame?
Deleted
There is a general tendency not to admit one has been wrong after having invested in something. A result is that people who have been scammed are generally unwilling to believe they've been scammed, even when confronted with evidence. They'll rather make up flimsy explanations for why the evidence can't be right.
So, no, the sucker won't learn fast, if at all. And it won't be cheap, because those that do learn will end up paranoid, unable to trust other people ever again.
Solid critical thinking skills start with a decent education. Decent education starts by making it free, neutral and accessible.
That's a good start, but critical thinking must also be focused on as a skill. It's far too easy to regurgitate a textbook and even regurgitate what other people have thought on the matter. In things like math it's easy to learn the method without understanding, and in things like science you spend a lot of time catching up with that others have done or experiments with an expected outcome that is more reproduction than experimentation. Linguistics teach you to express things but again doesn't really help critical thinking alone.
Sure, you can do more critical thinking on subjects already discussed to death by millions of scholars around the world, but given the tendency to google instead of thinking yourself it really only works on those who already want to think for themselves. To teach critical thinking you need to make them "think where no man has thought before". Make up a situation they won't find on google, ask them to argue some opinions, form arguments and give reasons for their logic. Unfortunately that is orthogonal to teaching them about the big and important events in history, which is so much more concrete and measurable. So we get people that know a lot about the world and understand little of it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here's why:
If it illegal to take someone's money by use of force, so it should *not* be legal to do the same with a pen or a computer.
If the strong of body cannot rob the weak, the strong of mind should be prohibited from doing the same.
Because outside of the damage they inflict upon naive individuals and their families, if left unchecked (as we basically saw with the housing bubble) they have the potential to inflict damage upon the real economy.
Because a large percentage of people are not smart with money but are otherwise extremely capable of being productive contributors to society. As a society it benefits us for people to be justly rewarded for their fruitful labor, which requires mitigating the potential harm of their money-foolish character flaw.
And finally, to the extent that money becomes a hack as opposed to an accurate representation of labor and capital, it is devalued as a concept, which decreases its global worth and utility.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Ponzi scheme is not the same as pyramid scheme.
One important difference is that with Ponzi scheme you do not receive any real, i.e. not on paper, profit immediately.
In other words, I do think the law should protect you from being robbed and mugged, it should give you a title to enforce a contract you and another party willingly entered in, but why should the law protect or even reward someone for acting like a complete moron?
We need laws against robbery and being mugged not to protect strong people, but to protect people who are weaker and/or less well armed and less violent than the muggers. The laws are there to protect people who are physically weaker. I think it is quite sensible to also protect people who are mentally weaker. If the law protects me from a person who uses a gun or a knife or strong fists to convince me to hand other my money, why shouldn't the law protect me from a person who uses his brain and his smooth talking mouth to convince me from handing other my money?
Cry me a river Sophie! There is quite a chance that the national debt will mean nothing at all to any of us or our grand children. This is the old right wing scare tactic and nothing more.
In case you haven't realized, there's not enough people to buy t-bills to finance the debt at a rate the government can live with, so the federal reserve is printing money to buy up to about a 300B worth in addition to the trillion dollars worth it already holds. So we're printing money to pay for things, and, that's the kind of crap third world countries do. The only reason we can get away with it is because the dollar is the reserve currency of the world and now everyone has to pretend that the dollar is still worth the same as it was before, even though the Fed is printing away, otherwise, they lose all of their stuff.
I wouldn't cry a tear for these dollar holders overseas those. By and large these people are holding dollars in an attempt to keep their currencies relative to the dollar so they can export more junk to the USA. Like the Chinese, Japanese, you name it.
So what the Gov't is doing, in the big picture, is to take advantage of the fact that our trading partners are trying to use our own currency to screw us, and are instead using that to go buy massive amounts of stuff with it.
Meanwhile, the those of us that save have to run the risks of having all of our assets getting wiped out because of defacto dollar devaluation. What really sucks is that dickering over exchange rates is absolutely the worst way to mediate trade. It would be so much simpler just to set up quotas and tarriffs and have some protectionism, then it would be to screw up the entire money system of the world.
This is my sig.
Did his analysis include the stock market dropping in value by 50%?
Just curious. Might not be applicable if he didn't.