A little background reading first for those of you who are not familiar with what a Ponzi scheme is.
I would assume most of you are doing your daily activities because you want to make some form of money and, you also hope that you'll be able to retire comfortably one day.
That's an admirable goal and the Internet has spawned a plethora of various systems, methods, etc. for people to go from very little wealth to significant amounts of it in a short time.
One of those method's that happens to be occuring at the rate of a fast game of whack a mole is the creation of surf for pay websites.
The idea is that if you surf X number of websites you'll get paid to do so. You, of course, pay a small amount of money to participate and they pay you daily interest.
So, for instance, you might put in $100 today, surf 10 sites a day, and get paid 20% of the money you have invested (compounded daily of course) for doing that small bit of surfing.
After 10 days of this your $100 investment has gone to over $600 (assuming I hit the right keys on my calculator :P).
The problem with all of this is that the payouts are often based on more people coming into the scheme. At some point they'll fail and those who came into the program late will lose their money.
The funny thing about all of this is that it's illegal (in the US) to promote or run a Ponzi scheme but it is not illegal to be a victim.
So the question then becomes - is it a bad thing if you decide to participate in a program like this knowing that you have very good odds of being a victim and that this is simply a high yield high risk investment opportunity?
G-Man
By: GeoffreyF67
To Ponzi or Not to Ponzi - That is the question!
Moz News
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Sounds like the Social Security Administration!
Answer is really simple. Don't. I made money and lost money with them. Overall, they are a waste of time. One thing you didn't mention is that 99% of the ponzis are not really ponzis but just plain scams. As soon as the program owner made what she considers enough, it's closing the shop and running away time.
If they are taking the trouble to run an illegal program, what reason do they have not to run away with people's money? Maybe a handful of old schools honourable ponzi admins are out there still, but these games got so popular in the last 2 years that it's been an attraction for low life skill-less scammers with a very low risk and very low entry barrier.
You are getting into a dangerous topic here... I say this again: run away from ponzis, you'll lose money, and if you make some, it is the money that some other "investor" is going to lose, as these are all member-to-member schemes, so think about the morals of that, and ask yourself if you are any better than the scammer that runs with the members' money.
Ponzis are crap. Period.