I've been reading internet newsgroups a long time and I've generally ignored these get rich quick pyramid scheme posts. Are people really dumb enough to keep falling for this. I finally decided to do the arithmetic myself. If you want to see how bogus these things are, I've done the calculations.
My apologies to the good people on alt.tv.b-n-bh. I am sorry for wasting the bandwidth of this group. But I have only just subscribed and I've already seen three of these pyramid scam posts in a few days. I hope that the responsible posters will tolerate this. I also know that whoever posted the original will likely not see this post - however maybe I can prevent someone from being suckered.
One bright invester claimed to make $23,343 with this scam - $1 at a time.
If you made $23,343 that means there are 23,343 people out there who sent you a dollar and then posted, lets say for the sake of argument, 10 postings to the internet. That makes 233,430 postings - just at the first level of the pyramid below you.
If each of those 23,343 people expect to make $23,343 off of their $5 investment, then 23,343 more people have to get in the scheme FOR EACH PERSON IN THE 23,343 WHO SENT YOU $1. That makes 23,343 times 23,343 - which is 544,895,649. That is almost 545 MILLION people. That is way more than the population of the USA. Then for each of those people to make 23,343, it would require 12,719,499,134,610 more to get in the scheme. That is 12.7 TRILLION people. The population of the entire world is 5 billion people. It would require 2453 times more people than there are in the world for the people at the second level of the pyramid to make $23,343. I'm not going to get into how cluttered the internet is going to be by this time when all these trillions of people are posting 10 messages each. Oh, what the heck. A mere 127 TRILLION MESSAGES have been posted.
Even if each of the 23,343 smart investors who sent you money expect to make only $3,000, it will take 70,029,000 new people to do it. That is 700,290,000 new postings of your really insightful message to the internet. At only the second level.
OK, so we give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you made $375. So for each of those $375 people to make $375 would take 140,625 new people. That is 1,406,250 messages to the internet. Then for those 140,625 people to make $375 would require 52,734,375 new people. Again, assuming 10 messages by each person, that would be 527,343,750 new messages to the net. It requires 52.7 MILLION PEOPLE at the third level, just for all people at level 2 to make $375.
In short, this don't work. Do the arithmetic.