Back in the pre-Internet days, we all used to get pyramid schemes and chain letters in the mail. Scammers dress up these schemes with the reputable-sounding Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) tag, but it’s still a scam.

One of my favorite forms of letter scams was the simple “send us money to learn how to make money” routine. This was an attempt to get around the law that said you couldn’t ask for money unless you offered something tangible for it in exchange. So you got information for your money.

The information was a brief description of the scam you just fell for. That is, you’d send in $10 (to a non-traceable / temporary P.O. Box, usually) for their marketing “secret,” and they’d send you an explanation that if you just solicited money in the same manner, you’d make as much as they do.

But wait – you can make much more! Sell this very system to people who will then sell the system to other people and so on and so on, and you can create multiple levels of income while other people are doing most of the selling!

Which of course never happens. Nobody knows anybody in real life who is rich from such a scheme. Except for maybe Bernie Madoff, who’s currently serving a 150 year prison sentence for it.

The Internet has streamlined and accelerated this scam. Instead of photocopying a letter, putting it in an envelope, addressing and stamping it, and then mailing it to a MLM list you probably bought through the Yellow Pages, you obtain a list of email addresses from the ‘Net and BCC one email to thousands of potential suckers.

Instead of checking your mailbox for stacks of checks, you log in to your PayPal account to see how many people you hooked.

Better yet (for the originators of the scam), sales websites are already set up and for a fee you are allowed to promote that website and share the revenue it generates. Again, all you’re doing is selling the idea of collecting money, but the routine is seductive enough to sucker in lots of people.

But does it really generate that much income? Remember, this scam has been around since before most of us were born. If we fell for it once, we probably won’t fall for it again. You’re certainly not stupid enough to try to sell this idea to your own friends and relatives. Lists of email addresses are resold so many times that those recipients have either changed their email accounts or merely screen out the junk like your email solicitation.

What’s left is only a minor portion of society that is still susceptible to such pie-in-the-sky scams, and you have to share that small pool with all the other would-be scammers out there.

Meanwhile the original scammers – the ones who start the ball rolling and who create the original websites – reap the income of their own first-sales plus half of your sales.

Here’s an example of one of these websites, de-activated for your protection. Note the typical total lack of information despite the massive, repetitive word count. Note the misspellings even after being on the ‘Net for years. Note the generic stock photos. Note the idiotic one-long-page structure. If you happen to be solicited by two different people pushing this “system,” note how their sites and personal stories are identical to each other.

I won’t even get into the math of payouts in deeper-level pyramids, which prove their lie. Pyramid sales never go that deep in real life, anyway. A few quick bucks are made and interest peters out.

If you manage to scam a few people yourself, you’ll have some pocket money. But you’ll have gone to the Dark Side in the process.

Scrud Kelley

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