The Sunday Times recently ran a story about a pyramid scheme that has tricked thousands of women out of their money in Great Britain. The pyramid scheme uses semi-feminist rhetoric about women’s empowerment to sell its get rich quick message.
According to the Times the scheme originated with a 57-year-old businesswoman named Theresa Hammer who joined a group known as Women Empowering Women, which apparently had its start in the United States. Literature for the WEW scheme claims,
It is the belief of the WEW gifting groups that there is plenty for everyone. When we are open tot give, receive and encourage each other, emotional and financial benefits will follow.
We are literally creating a new economic experience. The old belief of having to work hard for anything worthwhile in life is now changing and shifting with this process … the process is strong and continues to grow stronger with each participant, created through the wisdom of Women Empowering Women.
Of course what is really going on is that money is simply changing hands without any productive work taking place in a scheme that is unsustainable and quickly burns out — but not before thousands of people lose everything they put into the scheme.
It wouldn’t be a feminist-tinged pyramid scheme, however, if there wasn’t a blame-the-men angle to it. The Times reports that it contacted friends of Hamer who claimed she was getting a raw deal from her critics,
They denied, however, that she had made money out of other people’s misfortune. Her intentions and actions had been entirely charitable, they said, but the WEW ideal had been hijacked by men who had transformed it into money-making schemes. They also denied that Hamer, now in America again, had fled there with funds made by exploiting other women.
The really shocking thing about this is that more than 80 years after Charles Ponzi invented the pyramid scheme and pulled off one of the biggest con jobs in history, all con artists need to do is dust off the scam, add a twist such as “women empowering women,” and people will still fall head over heels to give their money away.
Source:
Crackdown on feminist pyramid scheme. Tom Robbins and Rachel Dobson, The Sunday Times (UK), July 29, 2001.