Online Scams !!
ATTENTION: I have provided some of the technical facts in the following post for any sane mind to actually question the businesses running such schemes, to dive in deep, please feel free to do it your self if you have the expertise.
recently I had an experience to getting to know online working platforms that claim to give very high ROI on little investments. Digging in deep how the business was portrayed to work I quickly realized that there are ponzi / pyramid schemes in the digital format with a touch of MLM (Multi Level Marketing) all boxed in one platform, a similar to the Double Shah scheme ran in Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Shah
The essential difference between the two frauds is that a Ponzi scheme generally only requires investment in something from its victims, with promised returns at a later pay date. Pyramid schemes, unlike Ponzi schemes, usually offer a victim the opportunity to “make” money by recruiting more people into the scam.
- Both pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes involve unscrupulous investors taking advantage of unsuspecting individuals by promising them extraordinary returns in exchange for their money.
- With Ponzi schemes, investors give money to a portfolio manager. Then, when they want their money back, they are paid out with the incoming funds contributed by later investors.
- With a pyramid scheme, the
initial schemer recruits other investors who in turn recruit other
investors and so on. Late-joining investors pay the person who recruited
them for the right to participate or perhaps sell a certain product.
These are some of the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme:
- Emphasis on recruiting. If a program focuses solely on recruiting others to join the program for a fee, it is likely a pyramid scheme. Be skeptical if you will receive more compensation for recruiting others than for product sales.
- No genuine product or service is sold. Exercise caution if what is being sold as part of the business is hard to value, like so-called “tech” services or products such as mass-licensed e-books or online advertising on little-used websites. Some fraudsters choose fancy-sounding “products” to make it harder to prove the company is a bogus pyramid scheme.
- Promises of high returns in a short time period. Be skeptical of promises of fast cash – it could mean that commissions are being paid out of money from new recruits rather than revenue generated by product sales.
- Easy money or passive income. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you are offered compensation in exchange for doing little work such as making payments, recruiting others, or placing online advertisements on obscure websites, you may be part of an illegal pyramid scheme.
- No demonstrated revenue from retail sales. Ask to see documents, such as financial statements audited by a certified public accountant (CPA), showing that the company generates revenue from selling its products or services to people outside the program. As a general rule, legitimate MLM companies derive revenue primarily from selling products, not from recruiting members.
- Complex commission structure. Be concerned unless commissions are based on products or services that you or your recruits sell to people outside the program. If you do not understand how you will be compensated, be cautious.
All Pyramid Schemes Collapse
When fraudsters attempt to make money solely by recruiting new participants into a program, that is a pyramid scheme, and there is only one possible mathematical result – collapse. Imagine if one participant must find six other participants, who, in turn, must find six new recruits each. In only 11 layers of the “downline,” you would need more participants than the entire population of the United States to maintain the scheme. This infographic shows how all pyramid schemes are destined to collapse.
What I investigated in my little free time is as follows;
Scam running from richace.net / richace.com / richace.vip / rchace.com all collapsed and the scammers ran off with a lot of money by 31st Oct 2022. On 1st Nov 2022 the same scheme is now launched as gomemall.run and is also running as queentask.com
The similarity in all these scams is that all are running of alibaba cloud hosting protected by cloudflare
as well as running telegram groups with similar offerings and mechanism
Why I say all is the same, looking at the code inspector, the coding is almost the same at the backend
The above is in no way a through deepdive investigation evidences but are enough for any sane logical mind to run far away from such businesses.