Do those paypal money making schemes actually work?

[penguin_man]

Hi,
im new to the forum as you can see and i thought i would post up a question here about these money making schemes on ebay where you pay somone 3 quid and it is meant to turn into loads more money. It all seems prety suspicious to me.
I found this one today and was just wondering if anyone has tried anything like this and if it works before i try it.

below is the link

Link ditched to avoid free scam publicity --Kez

Thanks!

[Allen]

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

That's a pyramid scheme, much like the iPod one's, though you don't have to pay anything for the iPod one's. I wouldn't trust them at all.

Actually, I might setup a new eBay account and register my own "free money" scheme, see how many people are daft enough to make me rich!

Welcome to the forums btw.

[autopilot]

There is one born every day! It's a con mate. Not only that, but they are against eBay rules (even law?) and after giving them your money they will probaly have thier account cancelled (don't believe his lies, this is just pyramid scheme).

[muddyfox470]

I would be very sceptical of this, and as other people have said if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. If you want to waste some time, and you have £3 to try it out, why not, but i probably wouldn't. If all you have got to lose is £3 then fine, and in about 3 months you can tell us how much you have got etc

The majority of these things are scams, and that link to the auction should probably be taken away as it could be called 'advertising'.

Ian

BTW. i did stupidly sign up to one of these free ipod mini things, and despite a massive waiting time, it did eventually come. But i guess i was lucky. (I probably wouldn't do it again!)

[Garion]

The short straw of it really is... dont trust anything that says you can make lots and lots of money really easily by giving someone else money...

PS before the smart asses point out that the national lottery is really easy to make lots of money by paying someone else... how many of you have actually won it big?

PS: Fellow noobie here too... hehe

[Yohji]

I hate the people that sell links on eBay... That really gets on my nerves.

[Nick F]

I wish ebay would actually put some of their profits back into staff, it would be possible for them to actually check each new item for sale to make sure its not a link or prymaid scheme!

[5lab]

i WISH people would remember to put all the words in their sentances

[Nick F]

i WISH people would remember to put all the words in their sentances

whoops

[doomgiver98]

those ones are a serious scheme if this 1 isnt, ive done it myself and so have atleast 5 other people, if you read it you will see the logic in it.

[Saracen]

Pyramid schemes are illegal in the UK, and have been since 1971.

But ... what is a pyramid scheme?

If it's a scheme where you make money because you recruit people below you (in the pyramid), who recruit people, who recruit .... well, that's illegal.

If you recruit people to act as sellers for a legitimate product, and those that sell enough or recruit others can make money from them, then that isn't a pyramid scheme and, whilst subject to regulation, isn't illegal. Examples might be Amway, Tupperware, and so on.

A pretty good guide to the difference is that the legit schemes will have a genuine product where the selling price and the 'distribution structure' are reasonable. At the end of the day, for a legit scheme to work, there has to be a product and it has to be one that people will actually buy for the product itself ... not as a money-making scheme in it's own right.

But with a pyramid scheme, each lower level on the scheme can ONLY make the same money if they can continue to grow the scheme at the same rate. A simple look at compound growth shows why this structure MUST, sooner or later, collapse.

I start a scheme, and "sell" it to 10 others. That's 10 people each of whom have to sell to 10 more. That's 100. The next level is 1000, 10,000, 100,000 and then 1 million. So, seven levels in and you need a million members to make it work for the next level.

What next? 10m, then 100m, then a billion, then 10 billion, then 100 billion.

Well, after 12 levels, you must be finding some real pillocks, because the only way you'll do that is if some of the people that have already bought in do so again, because we ran out of the planet's population some time ago (partway through completing growing to level 11, to be exact). So to manage level twelve, every person on earth has to have signed (and paid) up ..... about 13 times.


In these schemes, only those in early enough will make money, and they will fall apart eventually. It's a zero-sum game, involved in distributing money from the late joiners to the early members.

[vinnyT]

If all you have got to lose is £3 then fine, and in about 3 months you can tell us how much you have got etc

Sure if you were just handing over the £3, but you're not, you would be asked to supply personal info, which could be used for many other purposes such as id theft.

As has been mentioned, it's illegal in the uk to operate/promote what boils down to a pyramid scheme.

Welcome to the fora penguin_man and Garion.