by Marc Phillippe Babineau

Created on: August 30, 2008

The basics of internet pyramid scams are that if you can send out 1,000,000 emails, and have 10 people respond to them in hopes of making it rich, you are well on your way to your own riches. If only 0.01 percent of the people that you send invitations to respond with cash, you can make a lot of money, retirement type of money. But, these people just get too greedy, and do not know when to hold em, and when to fold em (to catch-phrase Kenny Rogers). The real silly part about that is that most of these scams originate in Third-World Countries, where the average person lives off of less than $0.10 a day, and if the perpetrators of these scams would have stopped and ran after their first couple of million dollars in profits, they would be living life large, instead of doing life after being at large.

How Internet pyramid scams work is that one person starts off at the top' of a pyramid (draw one on a piece of paper, one square on top, four on the next, eight the next, then 16, 32, 64 etc. on each lower level) until people stop responding, or the police get involved and it is time to move on to that exotic island with the Swiss bank account. The people on the second level each pay a fee to the top level person, and each are responsible for recruiting four more people, who each pay a fee to level two and level one players. Now there are sixteen people on level three, and the top player gets a fee from all of them, as well as from the four players right below him. Then the sixteen people are all responsible for getting four people each to respond, giving the level one player 64 shares, plus fees from the players on levels three and two (as a cut' of each persons' take, or financial gain).

Let's say that level two players each pay 30% of their profits to the level one player, and a fee of a pre-defined amount per added level to the pyramid, as each level two player gets a share of all money that is generated below them. There is a starting fee;, usually $50 to $100, not too much to scare too many people away. $20 to $30 of each fee would go to the person above each player on the pyramid, and they would have to give $6 to $9 to the person above them for each fee paid to them from below. Level four players will get shares of all players on levels below them, but will also have to pay fees and shares to each person above him, in their direct-line (to the person they responded to, and the person that that person responded to, etc. etc.). The only people to actually make

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