My friend on social refuses to see how this is a pyramid scheme

Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 342 points –

Or by her participating that she is knowingly involving herself in a scam. Which, yeah, it's just books - but it's pretty obviously a pyramid.

No shame if you don't see how it's a scam, the cozy blanket and glass of wine are meant to throw you, and they chose 36 because it's a confusing enough number where you don't think too much about how it grows.

She gives one book to her upline. She then sends out post to 36 more people to give her 36 books. Each one of them then needs to find 36 people each, which is now 1296 people in that level if they each want 36 books. Thus the exponential pyramid. Of course there is zero way each of them will find that many people, let alone the levels below that. It's a scam that benefits those higher up, and the ones lower will likely not receive anything.

Of course she sees nothing wrong with that. She said "Sometimes I get books, sometimes I don't, that's just part of the game". Which... it's not a game when it's real money being passed around.

On top of that, whenever we see a pyramid scheme we should be stamping it out - hard. Folks, please spot the signs and point them out. Don't be afraid to comment on posts calling them out as scams.

Edit: To be clear the idea of a growing book exchange isn't a bad one, as explained in the comments though the way to make it not a scam is to make it 1:1. You either send a book and receive a book, or if they like the 36 number, you change it to "I'll send a book to whoever sends me a book!". Then it's a true book exchange.

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Oh this gave me a nice nostalgia hit! Back in the late 60s I think it was, there was a similar scheme where you sent a dollar to the address at the top of a list of ten names, added your name to the bottom of the list and sent the list to ten other people. There were various other chain letter things going around, threatening a curse if you didn't pass them on, but this was a specific cash one. I had quite an argument with the idiot who sent it to me - he said the chain wouldn't work if I broke it. You were supposed to end up with hundreds of dollars.

Yes, my friend did several of those in the early 90s. He mailed many dollars. Never did he get a dollar.