Wife brought this up yesterday in conversation. She asked if she could "invest" $5,000 and claimed that it had a 100% chance of netting $35,000 after some indeterminate length of time.
Turns out, she was asked to join a "Women's Secret Society." I guess the basic premise of this group is as follows:
- You pay $5,000 to join the group. All $5,000 of that money goes towards a group leader, as a "gift."
- The leader seemingly has only two duties: lead a weekly conference call that each member of the group attends (to catch up, support one another, etc), and recruit more members to the group.
- Once the leader has recruited 8 women (thus, having been "gifted" $40,000), she is then ousted as the leader (and actually removed from the group entirely), and every other woman in the group moves up a "rank." The next most senior woman becomes the leader (and recipient of all $5,000 entry "gifts" from new members). On and on it goes, with the premise being that eventually all women will get to fill the roll of leader.
Yikes. Aside from some casual red flags (she was really taking the "Secret" part of this seriously...wouldn't tell me who invited her, the name of the group, or anything like that), the two biggest things that worry me are:
- What happens when the money dries up? There aren't an unlimited amount of people with $5,000 to throw into a pot, hoping they get $35,000 back months or years later. She didn't know the answer to this, but I highly doubt leaders are doing anything but just directly pocketing the money?
- She said that there are "sponsors" for the group...people who will pay 100% of your $5,000 entry fee, but you have to give them 50% of what you finally make when you're leader. To me, that's just too good to be true.
While they're not selling any actual products, this still feels a lot like an MLM/Pyriamid scheme to me. I tried throwing as much cold water on it as I could, but she was really gunning for my approval pretty hard. My chances of agreeing to this are pretty much 0%, but I'm trying to just find out more about this, and hopefully drum up some facts that help her see how bad of an idea this is.
Submitted March 14, 2017 at 02:40PM by amsage3 http://ift.tt/2lXzXgJ
