Have you spotted fake ads using Martin Lewis’s image?

Can you forward the phishing emails without opening them though? I can’t see a way of doing this on hotmail? (Outlook). Thanks.

It is important to distinguish between ‘pyramid selling’ and multi-level marketing [MLM].

Pyramid schemes are businesses that recruit people whose job is to enrol others into the scheme, rather than selling a product or service. The nature of the business model means a few people at the top end up earning money, and the large number at the bottom of the pyramid will make little to none.

Pyramid selling is illegal in the UK.

Multi-level marketing is a similar structure, but there is a product involved. The product can be anything, but it is usually some aspirational type of product that will appeal to a particular market segment both as a desirable item in itself [to attract sellers] and as a fashionable or trending item favoured by the wider market. People are led to believe that, because they like it, it will be easy to sell to lots of other people. It is now spreading from products that might exist in material form across to virtual products that have no physical existence.

There are therefore two levels of consumer to protect, those who buy stocks of the product for selling on, and those who buy the product direct from the seller.

MLM has been around in some form or other all my life but it has taken on a new dimension following the spread of internet marketing, especially through social media.

At both levels consumers are being exposed to detriment — either by pressure selling to shift bulk stock or through false markets to promote sales.

The way that social media works psychologically draws people into the net. Sellers buy products they cannot sell because the market is not as big as they were led to believe and there are thousands of other sellers out there. Consumers buy goods they think will be cheaper or better than they turn out to be and feel obliged by the social forces at work within the social media concept to help someone to whom they feel affiliated by buying from them.

Where this all goes wrong in a big way is through the deception involved. False promotions and endorsements, products that don’t exist, and sales that cannot be fulfilled. The lack of an identifiable presence for sellers is another problem; they might only exist in cyberspace. Names can change and people can disappear without trace.

Warnings about buying on-line and through social media have been issued in profusion but there is always another generation of susceptible people for whom the chance of some easy money has a strong appeal and overwhelms their natural sense of caution. Unfortunately, some of the susceptible people, at both levels, are also vulnerable, so, on top of the financial damage they suffer, serious psychological harm can result.

I don’t know how these forms of marketing can be completely controlled, because the exploiters and the exploited are facts of life, but, in my view, it needs to start with the platforms on which these schemes are given life, and that is mainly social media.

Nice one