The One Bad Thing About PONZI Schemes and The Right Way To Be A Part of It
If there will be a perfect theme, tag or title for the year 2016 in Nigeria, then it should be “The Year of Ponzi Schemes”. SIMPLE!
And if you ask why, then I will at once understand you don’t belong to this space and somehow I will be surprised you are even reading this post.
The whole show started with MMM which was launched in Nigeria around the later parts of 2015 or very early in 2016. It seemed to have come around what can be easily referred to as a perfect time.
That was a time when the country was really bleeding… the country had just been declared to be in recession and poverty is really looming on people. Jobs were getting lost and even those who are able to save theirs are struggling to get their salaries. Even people in business are finding it difficult to keep up as because things are getting more expensive and clients are not even easy to find anymore.
Personally, I experienced a decline of orders in my own mini-importation business and even the dollar rate has really gone very up that we had to increase the price on our products which brought about even more backwardness in sales.
So, people saw MMM as the best way to keep their cash flow active and they seemed very right to very huge extent because it was actually working. You know, sending money to someone and then after 21 days, having someone else send back your money to you and this time with a 30%, let’s call it interest… 30% better than keeping the money in the bank.
Thousands, if not millions of people got paid from this MMM last year alone. And only God and maybe Mavrodi and his cohorts can tell how much money got circulated within that year… But a source claimed it got to billions.
MMM was not only participated by individuals, in fact, several organizations, including the non-profits placed some stakes into MMM. Yeah, don’t be surprised, I know of a Church.
Even people who campaigned against MMM like my humble self actually at a point tried it out. Yes, I PHed (Provided Help) in July and GHed (Get Help) in August but I didn’t go back into if since then.
It got really crazy that MMM is currently the No.5th most visited websites in Nigeria. See the image below.
Now, MMM is just the most popular Ponzi scheme of 2016, it actually penetrated the market and paved way for others to be able to come in. Many of them made a lot of people money in that year.
But the bad thing about all these Ponzi schemes is that at one point, they will finally crash. It doesn’t matter what methodology they are based on. It doesn’t matter how many months or years they have lasted for. THEY WILL ALL CRASH ONE DAY.
The participants of Helping Revolution and some others are already counting their losses while the current fate of MMM participants will be decided on the 14th of this January, when we will find out if they will really come back from this vacation, or it’s actually the end of it.
Come to think of it, what is the main purpose of spending a lot of money to create a website, hire staffs/admins and do promotions to make see the website and join the scheme?
Do you really think it’s because someone wants to help people or make money?
I have always asked MMM fanatics in Nigeria a question which they are never able to give answers to. Let me just throw it here and let’s see if you have the answer I seek. The question is;
Who is the first person in Nigeria to provide help and who got the help?
Well, with that being said, I don’t really think it is that bad to be a risk taker. But let’s talk about the right way to do a PONZI scheme
The right way to do a Ponzi Scheme
It’s simple, do it and keep it to yourself.
Forget about the commission and all that you want to get. I remembered I felt so bad in the day of JustBeenPaid see people lose money because they trusted my judgment of the scheme. Eve though, I made a lot of money from that one, I still saw myself as a loser because, I felt I betrayed people’s trust.
Recently, I fell into that same trap with a scheme called zarfund, I felt it could be an avenue to help people raise money for the best business in the world which I am currently doing. So, whenever someone talk to me and say; “Idris I wish to do FLP but I can’t raise N65,000 yet, I ask them if they can afford N14k and help them get into zarfund, if they answer YES” but then it failed. I am couldn’t live with.
Right now, a friend of mine who actually made me invest in MMM in July 2016 couldn’t really sleep well anymore because he had too many people referred into the scheme and many of them are first timers. That’s just the way it is. Promoting PONZI’s can taint one’s reputation.
Thanks for reading, share to spread the word.
Idris Adeleye
