I recently happened to hear about a pretty interesting Pyramid Scheme scamming operation which is dubbed the ‘Fractal Mandala’ and targets members of the – if I may call it so – over-spiritual new-age-hippie community. It is a professional scamming operation that, of what I understood, must have made quite some serious money for its contrivers. I decided to write this report as a potential warning to candidate victims of this fraud.
I heard about it from a friend whom I recently met after a long time. That guy lately got a bit too much involved in that new-age-hippie thing. I define this as the sort of folks who hang out a lot in yoga centers, pay large sums of money to confine themselves in obscure Vipassana meditation retreats in India, participate in costly Shamanic ceremonies of sorts experimenting with exotic new-world psychotropics, become fanatic vegans, they have difficulties to make a sentence that doesn’t contain at least one Hindu-Sanskrit term, etc…
By the way, I don’t want to be understood like criticizing this lifestyle in any way. I have nothing against those people. Rather the opposite, I tend to like them a lot.
Speaking about the casual stuff people commonly speak about when reunited after many years, that friend of mine mentioned an investment he recently did. He was initially reluctant to give any particulars about it, as if he’d been instructed to keep it a secret or whatever, but after I showed some zealous interest, it became our subject of conversation for quite some length of time. At first, he tried to explain to me the nature of that investment by blurting out various pieces of nonsense about fractals, hearts, too much love, the universe, and such, generously complemented by unintelligible Sanskrit vocabulary.
After I managed to clarify to him that, though he may be understanding it himself, I don’t understand a shit of what he’s saying, he gave an honest effort to make himself clearer. The whole thing remained excessively vague though.
The best I understood was that he’d paid €500 to become a privileged member of an enlightened, secret-knowledge-pocessing society of sorts; and that, at some later stage, his membership will pay off astronomical interests, following the intervention of the universe.
In order to clarify the concept even further, he showed to me a picture. There was a heart fragmented into three concentric rings within it, which contained radial segments of different color. In each one of those stood a first name alone. In the core segment of the heart stood the chief (in fact some fancy, oriental term for it which I can’t recall) of their fraternity. In the outer layers stood the newer members where that guy’s name was placed, too.
Nobody knew any of the other members, apart from the one who directly conscripted them, but they infinitely loved each other. Their goal was to move their way towards the center of the heart (which they’d do after conscripting new, €500-paying members. Then they would meet with each other and, apart from getting rich (which was a detail compared to the profound purpose of the mission), something of sublime spiritual importance would happen. The image looked something like this one but was shaped like a heart instead:
Now everything became clear. It was nothing but a common pyramid scheme scam adopted to target people of that too-spiritual, new-age-hippie demographic. What perplexed me was how that dude fell so easily for such bullshit, as I deem he is rather intelligent.
The most surprising thing was that he was so rabid about the whole thing that he didn’t want to hear anything when I tried to explain to him what that thing really is about. After a certain point, he even got offended so that I judged it was wise not to push more. Sometimes it’s better to learn the hard way.
This fervor of him, as I understood, was principally owed to the blind trust he had to the person who conscripted him in the group. That was a girl whom he met in a shamanic ceremony – one of those costly ones where a group of South American tricksters tour around Europe pretending to be coming straight from the depths of the Amazonian jungles – and fell in love with. There might for real have been a group into which she also was scammed. She might have been the scammer herself. Couldn’t know this…
I tried to convince him to give me some details (like full names, the bank account of the person he paid the money to, etc) which I’d like to use for one of those scamming-the-scammers pranks I often like to do, but no chance I could do that yet. Perhaps in the future though.
In case someone doesn’t know what a pyramid scheme is, it is a fraudulent financial model which has been circulating for at least a century in various versions. The main idea is that the scammer recruits new ‘partners’ who submit a fee to join the pyramid. In order to be persuaded to do so, they are promised to be given cuts of the fees for every new ‘partner’ they refer themselves, potentially making huge profits.
It is, of course, theoretically possible for one ‘partner’ to indeed make profits, but that would require that the scammed turns into the scammer. Overall, as no positive investment is involved, the pyramid will collapse with mathematical precision once the limit of potential recruitments has been reached. I assume that in most of the cases such schemes would not develop further than a couple of layers of recruits, and the only person who comes out with a gain is the one who started the pyramid in the first place. Thus pyramid schemes are considered scams and are illegal in most of the world. You may check out Wikipedia’s article for a deeper analysis of those schemes.
The new-age-hippie branch of this scam seems lately to be especially active in both online and offline hangouts of the over-spiritual kind. If you’re interested to further-read about this topic, you may check out these very interesting stories about similar scams circulating the Internet:
