Pyramid Scheme Quotes

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

No Ponzi schemer tells anyone exactly how it works. The purpose of a Ponzi scheme is to trick people, to take the money and run.

I have a problem with the way the House is run. I believe that a few people at the top of a pyramid of power have controlled this place for a long time.

My favorite pre-Ponzi schemer was known as '520 Percent Miller' because he promised 10 percent returns a week, or 520 percent a year. Of course he was just using new investors' money to pay old investors, and soon he was on the lam.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

New parents always sound like hucksters in a pyramid scheme. Anyone who has kids and then gets you to go and have kids gets a check from Huckster Headquarters.

It is a certainty that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. We believe it's harming a population of low-income, principally Hispanic people in the U.S. to benefit a handful of super wealthy people at the top of the pyramid.

A network marketing business is based upon the leaders pulling people up, while a traditional corporate or government business is based upon only promoting a few and keeping the masses of employees content with a steady paycheck.

Organized religion: the world's largest pyramid scheme.

Not only did this new pornography industry change the way men look at women and how we relate to sex, how we sell stuff, and not only did it change America's cultural landscape - it's also this incredible metaphor for a market-based economy. The great pyramid scheme that America has become. I felt like in were larger themes in terms of culture and economics that could be addressed.

I got a chain letter by fax. It's very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.

I did not sell Amway, but I sold Shaklee, which was an Amway-type product sold through multi-level marketing.

When running a Ponzi scheme, how does one avoid enormous, unexpected withdrawals - runs on the bank, so to speak - that would pull back the curtain and reveal a little man blowing smoke? One way would be to attract a core of investors who could be counted on to never withdraw more than a small percentage of principal each year.

The combination of Ponzi's huge personality and the enormous if brief success of his scheme, combined with the tremendous publicity which surrounded it, is ultimately what attached his name to it.

In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.

Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.

Network marketing is the big wave of the future. It's taking the place of franchising, which now requires too much capital for the average person.

I say we scrap the current system and replace it with a system wherein you add your name to the bottom of a list, and then you send some money to the person at the top of the list, and then you... Oh, wait, that is our current system.

The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

For those of you who believe in the Social Security Trust Fund, you can’t trust it; there is no fund, and no one is secure …. A Ponzi scheme.

If you think of the typical Herbalife distributor and their level of sophistication, to this day I still don't understand the marketing plan - true story.