The Social Media Pyramid Scam

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Social media personalities generated more than $4 billion in one year for large social media pyramid scam users. A pyramid scheme or as I prefer to call it, pyramid scam, is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments for enrolling others into the scheme scam, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services. Social media are a hidden, nonetheless an out-in-the-open version of a pyramid scam. You’ll see what I mean soon. It recruits members – other businesses or individuals – with the promise that they will make money, by “helping divulge” their personalities or commercial activities as long as they increase the number of LIKES, SHARES and FOLLOWERS. It seems only natural that if an individual is a very talented person or if this product or service is on-demand, he will have a growing number of LIKES, SHARES and FOLLOWERS. However, it’s been revealed that people are able to pay marketing companies or hackers to literally produce thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of fake LIKES, SHARES and FOLLOWERS for a specific social media user. It is common to find articles online that not only promote buying or producing followers but also that call this practice legitimate in some instances. In other words, it is not what the individual social media user offers that attracts LIKES, SHARES and FOLLOWERS. If you still don’t understand why or how social media are pyramid scams, let’s go into another corner of the fraud. Perhaps the clearest example of a pyramid scam is the fact that a very small group of people get away with the cash while alleging that they are spreading the wealth in the form of a product or a service. Social media owners and thousands of people who see these tools as a positive rather than a negative would argue that they provide a platform for millions of people to make themselves, their products or their services known to the world and that they do so “for free”. Everyone knows that there is no free lunch, so the money that circulates around social media platforms exists and it is going into someone’s pocket. I am not talking about the average swimsuit model who makes a few hundred thousand dollars a year for endorsing a shampoo brand and for posting photos of it on her social media. I am talking about serious money. Now, many people would say that the previous scenario is a contradiction to my first argument, that no one but the owners makes money.in the social media pyramid scam. It’s not. Let me explain further. Another particularity of the social media pyramid scam is that both owners and first users enjoy the fruit of the novelty of the pyramid scheme. But this bounty of positive results only lasts for as long as the scam is a novelty, or in the case of social media, until the scam is exposed. Cult of personality business model If you want to know the proportion of the social media pyramid scam, take a look at this. While the average social media pyramid scam user is a mortal bottom feeder, and while the average user may get a few thousand dollars a month from selling his product or service, social media personalities generated more than $4 billion in one year for large social media pyramid scam users; those who have cash to pay them to endorse their product or service. How do they make all this money? They make it on the back of mindless consumers who cannot stop clicking those LIKE or SHARE buttons on social media posts.  How difficult is it to click LIKE or SHARE buttons, you may ask? Not too difficult, but that is not the point. The issue is how much time do bottom feeders – consumers – waste clicking or reading about the lives of others and how unproductive they become while doing that. There is no free lunch, remember? Social media owners lure compulsive consumers with all kinds of bait so they LIKE, SHARE or FOLLOW people or companies. Why do social media pyramid scammers and famous brands use bait?  “Most everyday brands find it difficult to naturally enter lifestyle conversations because they lack credibility in those spaces,” says Claudia Page, VP, Head of Creator Partnerships at Crowdtap. While social media personalities make over $4 billion for their sponsors, how much would these so-called personalities make for themselves? Earning power depends on who they are, as that determines how much they can charge brands. Your average fitness guru can charge around $4,000 per post and about $20,000 per ad campaign. Those amounts will of course also depend on how many followers the person who was turned into bait has in their social media accounts. Hence the importance of having buying followers. Seven million subscribers would land anyone a substantive $300,000 contract with Youtube, a Google company. That makes Youtube the most lucrative source for personalities. Paying someone $300,000 for a video campaign is peanuts compared to the money generated to social media pyramid scams via advertising. Before getting into those numbers, it is relevant to ask at this point how much of all that money do the consumers get? You are also making them money but in exchange for what? Nothing. So who are the big winners in the social media scam? If you think making $300,000 for a 30-second video clip is exaggerated or that getting paid $20,000 for an advertising campaign is […]

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