Pyramid crap

A friend of mine sent me the following info.

There is a new plague in Sri Lanka. It’s not Dengue, Leptospyrosis or AIDS. It’s pyramid banking schemes. There is one which gives a gold coin or something. There is another called Pentagono.

In this Pentagano scheme you have to pay Rs.1500 to your seller get an application form and then when you submit your form with Rs.3000 you get 3 forms so that you can sell them to your friends for 1500. They say this covers your cost. Then you get Rs.2000 from every sale down the line down to 7 levels and you are supposed to get Rs. 4,374,000 at the end. But there is a hitch here. Even these conmen had made a mistake. Not everybody in the pyramid on all 7 levels will get 2000 each. Everybody up in levels 1 to 7 will share the Rs. 2000 each. Or maybe the conmen didn’t made a mistake but expect the rest of us to be idiots who don’t know maths. Anyway this reminds me of an Asterix comic book I read sometime ago. In that book, Asterix and Obelix go to a town. I think its name is Lutetia or something. In that town all the people are shop keepers and all the shops sell wine and charcoal. So Asterix asks one man in that town to whom they sell the wine and charcoal since all the people in the town are wine and charcoal vendors. This man says that they sell it to each other. Asterix is supposed to be silly and hypothetical. But this pyramid schemes are real and serious. People put in their hard earned money in to them. But they fail to understand that to whom are we going to sell these forms when everybody in the country had already bought them. When you invest some money in something, that money will go to work, paying somebody some salary to produce something which could be sold at a higher price than what you paid as salary and you get some profit. That’s simple logical economics. But in these pyramid schemes eg. in this Pentagono scheme, you pay some money, a part of it is gobbled up by the schemers, and the rest goes to people above you in the pyramid. There is no growth in money. You get paid from the investment of people below you. If everybody could sell their 3 forms in say 1 month (as they say it’s supposed to be so easy) then there would be 24 levels in the pyramid in 2 year. That would mean that there would be 3 to the power 24. That is 282,429,536,481. That is 282 billion members and 464 trillion Rupees earned. But there is only 5 billion people in the entire world and the amount will be couple of hundred times the GDP of Sri Lanka. So since we don’t have 282 billion people in Sri Lanka, we would have to buy this crap among ourselves like the wine and charcoal vendors in that Asterix book.

If somebody is interested in brining these crooks to justice, their address is
Pentagano Lanka Trading Company
No. 2A, 1st Lane,
Nawala Road,
Nugegoda
Tel. 011 282 79 70

Don’t get caught in this scheme. It’s against all economics principles. It has been proven that these pyramid schemes do not work in USA, Yugoslavia, etc. and people have gone to prison for running these schemes. More than anything else, it contradicts common sense. You will loose your friends if you sell this crap to them and they couldn’t sell it to anybody else.
DON’T BUY OR SELL THIS PYRAMID CRAP.