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Life is a learning ground and I as a person who had done quite a bit of searching on how to earn some money had experienced being victimized by Ponzi/Pyramid schemes maybe due to my greed and also the desperation to earn some money.
What I am fortunate about is that at least I did not lose much money unlike others who went all in and lose much of their livelihood. And so I learned how to determine now what is legit and what is not. I am now very cautious in joining such sites even from less known steem apps.
Basically a non-legit or scam will make you invest and then refer to earn money from your referrals. When you start to see the words "Downline", or "pay for activation code" or "Binary"' or even especially "Matrix", those are your red stop light into venturing to that scam unless you want to touch the dog's ear.
For the second time around I had stopped my sister for joining a scam because these scams really are attractive with what they have to offer like you earn from referrals but all of you have to pay for activation code. It is a shame that the site is owned and operated by a local person from our country so I may have to report it to authorities soon.
So it will go fun in the first few days or months but when there are not much people will join in and then the Pyramid will collapse and all of you will look like a brittle Mummy in the end.