Is Herbalife A Pyramid Scheme?

WHAT IS A PYRAMID SCHEME?

Herbalife is often accused of being a pyramid scheme, but what does this mean?  What is a pyramid scheme, and why is it illegal? Is Herbalife actually a pyramid scheme, or is it a legitimate business opportunity?  This article examines pyramid scams, and answers all your questions about Herbalife.

THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA AND THE PHAROAH'S GOLD  - A METAPHOR

For 3800 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza stood as the tallest man-made structure in the world, reaching 480.6 feet in its heyday. To this day, it is the only one of the original seven Great Wonders of the World to still stand largely in tact. The beautiful Hanging Gardens of Babylon were destroyed by an earthquake more than 2000 years ago; The Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria both met similar fates. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia fell victim to a fire, while the Temple of Artemis and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus eventually succumbed to invaders. But for more than four and a half thousand years, the Great Pyramid of Giza has stood as one of the most impressive and bewildering structures ever created by man.

The Great Pyramid was finally beaten for height in c1300AD, when a new Spire at Lincoln Cathedral in England reached an impressive 525 feet. Since then, the height of buildings has steadily increased, and now the tallest man-made structure in the world is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, standing at a staggering 2717 feet tall. That’s taller than the CN Tower in Toronto (1815 feet), the Willis Tower in Chicago (1729 feet), The Empire State Building in New York (1454 feet), and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1062 feet).

But none of these buildings should be allowed to detract from the nauseating height of Giza’s Great Pyramid, the final resting place for its creator Pharoah Khufu.

But what on earth has Pharoah Khufu and the Egyptian Pyramids got to do with your Herbalife business? Well, the problem for Herbalife is that they are often accused of being a pyramid scheme, and the Great Pyramid at Giza provides the perfect metaphor for illustrating the dangers of becoming involved with one of these scams.

Imagine that you are standing at the bottom of Pharoah Khufu’s great creation. In front of you is the towering structure comprised of around 2.3 million blocks of limestone, and with a mass of approximately 5.9 million tonnes. The scorching Egyptian sun beats down on you un-obstructed, causing you to sweat profusely. At the top of the pyramid, perched delicately on the pinnacle, is a pot of Pharoah Khufu’s gold. A smartly-dressed, professional-looking man is standing beside you, and he offers you the chance to claim the entire pot of gold for yourself, if you can only scale the pyramid and pluck the gold before it topples from its precarious position and is gone forever. No problem, you think. After all, you’ve been to Paris and you’ve climbed the Eiffel Tower, and that was more than twice the height this is. You set off enthusiastically, convinced the gold is yours, with richness sure to follow.

But there is a problem. The nice man at the bottom of the pyramid has made the same offer to thousands of other people just like you, and as you clamber up the first few bricks, sun beating down relentlessly, you realise that there are hundreds of other people already further up the pyramid, making their way towards your gold. The further up the pyramid you get, the more congested it becomes, as the pyramid gets smaller and begins to taper off towards its point. And you can see, at the top of the pyramid, the man in the suit from the bottom is already there, helping himself to the gold. The potential rewards for reaching the top of the pyramid are decreasing before your eyes, and you are now exhausted by trying to fight your way through the crowds and reach the top. As you look down, you see more and more people climbing onto the pyramid, without any hope at all of making it to the top before all the Pharoah’s gold has gone, and doing nothing but adding to the already over-congested scrimmage. Exasperated, you give up, and begin the long climb back down the Great Pyramid of Giza with your pockets empty.

WHY PYRAMID SCHEMES ARE ILLEGAL

While the type of pyramid referred to by the phrase ‘pyramid scheme’ is obviously metaphorical and not literal like in our little tale there, the outcome is the same. There is money to be had for a small elite at the top of the pyramid, usually those who have devised and are operating the scam. Other members of the public are fooled into believing they too can get their hands on the big bucks, and invest significant amounts of money to get a slice of the pie. But in all cases, the money just isn’t there, the pyramid inevitably collapses, and those near the bottom lose everything. The reason for this is that in most pyramid schemes it is actually impossible to make money. Money is made purely by recruiting others to the scheme, and therefore in order for everyone in the pyramid to make money, there must be an endless supply of people, which there clearly can never be.

Think of it this way. Imagine a pyramid which contains only ten levels. It would be a very small pyramid, certainly not on the scale of our real-life pyramid in Giza. Imagine you start at the bottom of that pyramid with nine other new recruits, and you are told that in order to make money you each need to persuade another ten people to join the scheme, that is another one hundred people straight away. In order for you to scramble up to level seven, the pyramid would have to have one hundred million people in it, and in order to make level nine…well, there isn’t even enough people in the world to make that possible.

Pyramid schemes like this are illegal in most countries.

IS HERBALIFE A PYRAMID SCAM?

So now we come to Herbalife’s place in this story. Herbalife is often accused of being a pyramid scheme, usually by people who have bought into the company but have found it very difficult to make any money. They have done everything that people tell them to do – they have approached their family and friends, they have held sales parties, they have put up fliers on telegraph poles and placed small ads in the newspaper. They may even have paid to buy leads, which has ultimately come to nothing. Having tried all these marketing techniques without success, they come to the conclusion that it was never possible to make any money in the first place, and that Herbalife must be a pyramid scheme.

But Herbalife is not a pyramid scheme.

To find out why Herbalife is not a pyramid scheme, you can read the article in full, or watch a video presentation about pyramid schemes, at ExplosiveMLM.com

If you would like to learn the secret of how to add 700 people into your Herbalife business, click HERE to download your FREE report.