Does anyone remember the "Hearts" women empowering women pyramid scheme?

[cakeorwine]

I was listening to a podcast about scams and pyramid schemes - and this would have been an MN thread. It seemed to be aimed at a certain type of women - the idea was that you "invested" £3000 to buy a heart and then you got on the pyramid. Then you would recruit more women at parties and eventually you would get to the top of the pyramid and receive £24,000.

It attracted a lot of women, including some celebrities It did the rounds at particular parties. The Government were concerned about it.

I was surprised to read this article - i thought it was a parody but it wasn't. This is from the Spectator

Girls just want to have funds | The Spectator

The scheme did seem to stop. Does anyone remember getting asked about it?

I've not read the article, but I was a member of one of these schemes. You didn't have to invest in a 'whole heart', you could invest in an 8th.

I joined quite late but I did earn money from in. I then reinvested and got some family members to join but that was when it collapsed. They lost money and I felt dreadful.

We were told they had to shut it down as it had become an illegal practice.

That must have been about 20yrs ago.

Yes - it was about 20 years.

There was a more recent one called Give or Take - when you "became a bride" at the top of a pyramid

Three women sentenced for 'pyramid scheme' roles - BBC News

This shows how the pyramids multiplly

How-the-schemes-multiply.jpg (1173×827) (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Yes - I remember a friend telling me that she was thinking of investing as she liked the idea of women empowering women. Fortunately she didn’t go ahead with it.

Yes, I was invited onto it, but declined. I was taken along to one of their evenings, where three women were receiving their money. It was a good "hook' to prove that it really worked.

When I looked into it, I'd need so many women to join under me before I reached the top of the pyramid that it was blatantly clear that unless you got in right at the very beginning of the scheme, there was no chance of getting the payout.

There was no way I'd be asking anyone I knew to throw £3,000 into a bottomless pot, knowing the chances of them ever getting even their original "investment back".

Yes 23 years ago I had a friend from work in it fairly early on. One of us left before she got to the top so I’ve no idea if she got her money. She was in a lot of debt so it would have helped her.
it was really pushed as a sisters helping each other out kind of thing.

Yes it did the rounds in our midlands town around 2001. Moms at the school were going mad for it, discussing it in the playground, getting their sheets of paper out with the hearts on, having parties to recruit more victims. I was against it from the start and tried to dissuade the moms I knew from taking part but they wouldn't be told, they were completely brainwashed into believing in it and some were carried away planning what they would spend their payouts on, even telling their kids they would be going to Disney World etc. I explained about how quickly the amount of people needed to complete the pyramid becomes way more than you imagine but some women actually became annoyed with me for my negative attitude!

My DH and I knew someone who made money from it, a man (men set up their own scheme with fists instead of hearts) but none of the women I knew did, they lost money that they couldn't afford to and sometimes went into debt to do so.

My DH and I worked out that we could start our own pyramid and put ourselves at the top. We did so but set the buy in as much lower than the hearts one, I think it was £100? The women who were already in the original pyramid scheme rushed to join ours in the hope of making some of their original stake back. Our pyramid moved fast because it was less outlay and we made money, about £500 I think. I don't think anyone else did though!

I remember it. Similar schemes based on endless chain recruitment are still rife. Take "coaching", now you can train to be a coach and then train others to coach and so on. Or what about selling a product, pay to join with a starter kit, be your own best customer and purchase "promotion" then start recruiting everyone you know to be their own best customer and so on - multilevel marketing where research has demonstrated 99.6% of all participants lose money. A lot of the big recruiters who can no longer make money in MLMs are now rinsing people by offering worthless coaching.

In some ways this ability to disguise a damaging scheme as a legitimate business which is currently legal is far more dangerous than an obvious pyramid scheme. I wish the Government was more concerned and would deal with MLMs.

One sobering fact about pyramid schemes which explains why they can't possibly work for almost all investors is that if I start a pyramid scheme tomorrow and recruit just five people and those five recruit five people each, and then those 25 recruit just five people each, there only needs to be another 12 levels of recruitment beyond that before we'd require more people than are on the planet. That's if we can guarantee everyone on the planet is interested in being recruited!

Just need to put yourselves at the top, add some fake names and then get someone to join in. Quids in.

Illegal though

I agree. If a MLM is more interested in recruiting new people rather than selling its stuff, then there's an issue

@cakeorwine yep, and if the product they sell is almost always to their own sign ups then that is an internal purchase and simply a way of moving money up the pyramid. Very little product is sold to genuine customers who have not been recruited. Spot the difference between that and a pyramid scheme - I can't find it!