Just over a year ago I spent a great deal of time investigating an extremely dodgy pyramid scheme called the Prosperity Automated System or “PAS” for short.
Shortly after I wrote a couple of articles about the scheme, it was shutdown by the SEC and the organiser found himself in a legal nightmare that is probably still ongoing. In addition, thousands of people were left nursing extremely heavy losses after ploughing money into PAS which promptly disappeared along with the “sponsors” who introduced them to the pyramid scheme.
Anyway, PAS died a messy death and is pretty much forgotten now on the message boards. When one pyramid scheme dies, another soon takes its place and there are always plenty of suckers ready to join up and max out their credit cards.
One dodgy HYIP which has just recently been shut down by the SEC goes by the name “Colon End Parenthesis” which stands for 🙂 – a smiley face.
Warning signs in this one were typical of these unsustainable schemes….
Firstly, it was promised you could earn 2% per day on your so-called investment – always a big, big danger sign. NOTHING pays 2% a day, absolutely nothing and anything that claims to is almost certainly a scam.
Then it was hyped that the owner of this particular scheme was a Christian pastor or something similar. For some reason, people really trust people who say they are christian when, in reality, it doesn’t matter what race, religion, colour, sex, nationality, height, weight or hair colour someone is. ANYONE can scam you out of money. ANYONE can make fraudulant promises.
Thirdly, there were very few, if any, negative reviews of this scheme – mostly because everyone who had joined had an agenda. They had to promote it and say it was the best thing since sliced bread in order to draw more investment into the scheme.
Also, the promoter (the “Christian” fella) was very cagey about how the money was being made. He wouldn’t divulge exactly how he could pay all investors between 2% and 10% per day. No real surprise there!
In the end, the SEC stepped in to close down Colon End Parenthesis and bring an end to the cycle of investor’s money.
What was found was that all money invested was basically being paid back out to early investors to give them the “2%” return.
The promoter was also ploughing money in autosurfs and other dodgy internet investment schemes and HYIPs – not the real, offline business that he claimed.
So, in reality, when the SEC stepped in, there were no real records of how the money was distributed and it was revealed to be a complete financial mess.
As it turns out, the official receivers are now contacting people who made money from CEP with the aim of clawing back all the money invested.
It’s fair to say that the “winners” are going to be forced to give all the money back so that the “losers” have a small chance of getting a small percentage of their losses back.
You can read more on the huge thread on the “Money Maker Group” forums. I’m am not going to link to that site from this site because I do not want to promote those forums, they are full of dodgy HYIP promoters and people with Vested Interests in seeing you buy into a range of dubious pyramid and ponzi schemes.
Search them out on Google (and be very, very wary of a very dodgy female Moderator who heavily promoted the PAS scam).