Okay, so this isn't about Batman but about what I highly suspect to be yet another "get rich quick by doing nothing" scam. A buddy of mine started telling me about this new social media app called Rippln (rip-lyn) and that it is this new way of getting paid for the connections a person makes in social media. I'll let this supposedly secret NDA YouTube video (that can be found with a simple search and doesn't require a link to view) do the explaining. [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJ9gemxxD8[/yt] Doesn't that just *scream* "pyramid scheme" to you? I told my friend that I'd have to pass and if he does end up making a ton of money I will admit that I'm wrong and feel bad about myself, but that until then I'll stick to my "too good to be true" alert and stay far away from it. All it takes is a "rippln scam" Google search to even heighten my avoidance of it. He swears it doesn't cost anything to join and therefore is not a pyramid scheme but...eh, I'll still pass. So if anything, see this as a public service announcement to, IMO, stay the hell away from it and politely say "no thanks" if any friends try to "recruit" you as mine did.
Seen crap like this before. It's a scam. Though I am missing the part where they explain how this is NOT a scam... honest! They don't even try to hide that it's a pyramid, they just use a different analgy with the ripples... A flawed one at that. Ripples don't cause new ripples, they get created at the center and that's where the money is going.
"First, let me assure you that this is not one of those shady pyramid schemes you've been hearing about. No sir. Our model is the trapezoid!" - Speaker at "Million$ for Nothing" Seminar, "I Married Marge," The Simpsons
Sometimes they try to convince their victims that yoz are not supposed to scam your own friends, but that you are selling a real and revolutionary product instead. Only that it doesn't matter if no one ever uses the product (if it exists), as long as you keep finding suckers who want to get rich fast. So how many ripples a 7 friends until we have the entire world population included into this inner circle?
The only thing missing from this utterly scamtastic scam is a personal message from a "Nigerian prince" written or spoken in very poor English grammar. You be can very happy that you did not be falling for this, American friend.
Michael Scott says it's not a pyramid scheme. All I know is, every time some random guy on the internet starts off by telling you to go off alone somewhere and not tell anyone what you're doing because it's a secret, it always turns out to be totally legit.
If I go off alone somewhere and don't tell anyone what I'm doing because it's a secret, that usually means I'm jerking off. Come to think of it, this is the same thing.
I have done extensive research into these online things in the hopes of maybe getting in on one, but the more I see, the more I'm convinced that they're ALL scams. Any of you guys know of one that isn't?
That rings so many alarm bells. I don't want to imagine the kind of data it's collecting by wanting to know how many contacts a person has on social media sites.
"getting paid for social media" = SCAM, big time. It's just like those scams that say they can get you like 10,000 Twitter followers in an instant. This is no more legit than that.
If they sound like scams they probably are. There is no free lunch, especially not on the internet. You might make a few pennies via producing Youtube videos that are actually watched but that is no free lunch and certainly no way to get rich. A Ponzi scheme is a different matter, you can make money if you are one of the early participators. If you bought a house during the housing boom and sold it early enough you were one of the first players and benefited, if you bought one late in the hope that you can finance it Ponzi-style via itself (its rising price) you lost. As it is hard to predict when a Ponzi scheme collapses I would never willingly participate. In a casino you do at least know your odds.
Managing my company's social outlets is a not-insignificant part of my job. There are companies that will pay a stay-at-home Mom to sit on Facebook all day and participate in "like ladders," basically top-down affiliate marketing. It's a stupid practice because the quality of followers / fans generated is terrible, so any company that does that is beyond moronic, but there are legitimate operations that do this. Tweet Adder, which is a platform I recommend with significant reservations (primarily due to Twitter TOS issues), can net you more than a thousand new followers a day if used correctly. And that's just one platform out of many for doing so.
Getting rich isn't the goal. Finding something I can do from home since my cerebral palsy has made an eight hour a day job impossible is.
I had a work from home job through ODesk a couple of years ago. It was very boring and repetitive work and I was paid about $8.00 an hour, which was considered VERY good for that type of data entry/web search work, because normally what companies do is contract this work out to those in other countries who aren't subject to minimum wage and are willing to do the work for as cheap as $2.00 an hour. The company I worked for was a web company just starting out and very optimistic about what they would be able do and who they would be able to hire. Within just 3 months they cut the contractors in half, and I made the cut because I did fast and efficient work. Four months after that we were all cut loose as they couldn't afford to pay for this type of work anymore. So basically, if you get really lucky and find a unique opportunity, you may be able to benefit from it. However, it isn't likely to be stable or reliable work. And it likely won't pay very well at all.