And a classmate of mine fell for it.
It goes like this… There’s this company called Noni something, after a fruit that grows in Tahiti. I’ve checked, the fruit exists for real. Now, this company is trying to sell its juice like a miraculous product that can heal over 300 diseases, including the most nasty ones like cancer, kidney stones (which isn’t a disease as far as I can tell) and premature sexual impotence.
So far there is nothing new about this. This is older than my grandparents, heck, this is older than Christ himself. I’ve seen this more times than I can count. Last time I bothered to know what was being sold, it was some sun mushroom, which “could cure AIDS, tetraplegy, syphilis etc.”.
I always respond to these by saying “No thanks, I’m saving my bucks for the day when you guys sell something that deflects bullets.” But there was a novel trick in the last one that called my attention. I don’t know if this is a new trick for you, but it was for me (although still a hard one to fall for).
On previous iterations, these deals would victimize the final buyers of the product. This con targets the resellers. It goes like this: that Noni company is yet to open any stores in Brazil, yet it wants to work with potential market leaders already, before the grand opening. Thus, anyone wanting to be a Noni representative can pay 1000 bucks to get a Noni ID. With that, you can resell Noni juice. So you can buy a six-bottle kit for further 500 bucks a kit and then you can do as you please with these kits, the idea being that you’ll trade them for fat stacks of cash. In order to keep your ID, though, you must buy at least a kit per month.
The bulk of their presentation is not about the healing powers of the Noni juice, it’s about how one can achieve “financial freedom” by reselling it.
There’s more. You are then presented the pyramid - each reseller has to initiate another three resellers a trimester. In their chain of command structure, these three initiates will pass on part of their profit to you (just as you’d have to do with the one who initiated you). So now you’ve gone up a little in the hierarchy, and those three stand as you were in the beggining. Note that those three will have to gather three followers each, as well. Thus the more recent resellers give the money they get to the older ones, and the more generations you have after you, the more money you get for doing absolutely nothing (though you STILL have to buy, and supposedly resell, those kits).
Hm, so if each generation has three times as many resellers as the previous one, that stuff is meant to grow geometrically. A quick calculation shows that in 21 rounds this game would involve more than 5 billion people, which would leave the resellers at the base of the pyramid having to fight for the remainder less than a billion potential buyers. I highly doubt Haiti has enough land to grow enough Noni for the whole of humankind, and if it did, five billions of people buying a kit each per month of that stuff would amount a total of two and a half trillions of bucks every month in Noni tradings. Of course, these insane, astronomical numbers are never mentioned in the presentations.
That is supposing you get your three followers, and that they never quit and are absolutely loyal to you. Which is higly unlikely.
Now, guess who’s got a reseller in his classroom? The poor guy was telling us how that stuff has over 140 vitamins (OMFG; And most sellers say 140 “active substances”), tastes super duper sweety, and gives you the power to do roundhouse kicks. The rest I got via a prayer to Saint Google.
PS: the brazilian department of health says the stuff sold in those bottles around here are poisonous to the liver.
PPS: the fictitious currency I’m using here, the buck, is worth approximately half a dollar as of the beggining of November.
