Chapter 9: Bring Three Friends

Tuesday Night, Week 3

Lina came out of a video call tonight with a face I had never seen on her before: excited and worried at the same time, as if someone had handed her a present and she wasn't sure it was meant for her. The call was with her cousin Bruno. Bruno is a few years older than Lina. When they were children, he showed her how to take apart an old radio and put it back together, and she says that is the reason she studies computer science. She talks about him the way I talk about Grandma.

Bruno has joined something he calls a "wealth club". He was so happy on the call, Lina said, that she could hardly say anything. You pay to join, about as much as Lina spends on food in a month, and in return you get "learning packs": videos about money, a set of online lessons and a place in the club's group chat.

But the part Bruno kept coming back to was the "rewards". For every new member you bring in, you get a reward. For every new member that person brings in, you get a smaller reward. Bruno has already brought in four people, and he says his rewards have paid back his joining fee twice.

He wants Lina to join, and he told her, "Bring three friends and you'll have your money back in a month." He meant me, among others. He said, "Your roommate sounds smart. Smart people understand this."

Lina said she wasn't going to sign up tonight, because she lives with a girl who has a 24-hour rule. But I could see that she wanted to. Not because of the money, I think, but because it's Bruno. Saying no to a stranger in a group chat is one thing. Saying no to the person who taught you how a radio works is something very different.

I noticed something else, too, and I am not proud of it. When Lina told me that Bruno had called me smart, a small part of me felt flattered. I think that sentence was not really about me. It was there to make saying no feel like admitting that I wasn't smart after all.

A short update on Marcus: he saw Ms Okafor again today. They have made a budget, written in pencil so that it can change, and he has taken on two extra shifts a week, one more at his café in town and one at the campus café, because my manager said yes when I asked. So now Marcus and I sometimes wipe the same tables. He is still quiet, but today he ate a whole sandwich at lunch and laughed at something in the lab, and I am writing both things down here like test results.

Thursday Night, Week 3

Lina and I checked the "wealth club" tonight at the kitchen table, with a big sheet of paper from my biology drawing pad. Lina said she wanted to do it properly, "the way you and your grandmother do it". That made me feel proud, and also a little like Grandma, which is a strange feeling at eighteen.

We began with the question I think matters most for clubs like this one: where does the money come from? When Bruno gets a reward, someone pays for it. Lina read through his messages and the club's page, which Bruno had sent her, only to understand what the club claims. The page talked a great deal about "financial freedom" and "building your team". It said almost nothing about how the club's money is supposed to grow. Nearly every way of earning that it described was about bringing in new members. The joining fees of new members paid the rewards of older members.

Then Lina drew. At the top of the paper she drew one circle: Bruno. Under him she drew three circles, the three friends he brings in. Under each of those she drew three more, which made nine.

The next row had twenty-seven circles, and the one after that eighty-one. Then the paper was full, so Lina did the rest with a calculator. The sixth row would have more people than there are students on our floor and the two floors above, and the eleventh row more than there are students in our whole university. The twenty-first row alone would need about three and a half billion people. One or two rows after that, a single row would need more people than there are in the whole world.

"And that's if everyone brings exactly three," Lina said, "and nobody ever says no." She looked at the paper for a long time. "The people at the top get paid by the people underneath. The people at the bottom have to find new people to get paid. And at some point there are no new people left."

This is called a pyramid scheme: a scheme that pays earlier members mainly with money from newer members. Because the number of new people cannot grow forever, it must collapse, and when it does, it is the newest members, at the bottom, who lose their money. In many places, the rules do not allow such schemes at all.

The second question was: what is really being sold? If a club sells something real that people want, such as bread, its members can earn money from the bread even when nobody new joins. Lina looked at the "learning packs" Bruno had shared with her. There were a few videos of a man in a suit talking about "abundance" and the "right mindset", and a list of tips about saving money that Lina said she had seen for free in many places. "Nobody would pay a month of food money for this," she said, "if it didn't come with the rewards." So the thing really being sold was not the videos. It was the right to bring in others.

The third check was the register, because the club's page said that it "helps members invest" through "partner opportunities". We found the official office that supervises banks and investment firms by typing its name ourselves, made sure we were on its own website, and searched its official register for the club's name. It was not there. Lina searched again, using the company name written in small letters at the bottom of the club's page. It was not there either. "So they aren't allowed to offer investments," Lina said, "and their whole product is people." She said it very quietly.

Then I asked Grandma's third question out loud: who gains if Lina believes it? We looked at the top circle on the paper. Someone brought Bruno in, and someone else brought that person in. "The people near the top," Lina said, "and the people who started it. Bruno thinks he's near the top, because he can see four people under him. He can't see how many are above him."

I think the people at the top are afraid of exactly the question we started with. If everyone asked where the money comes from, nobody would join.

Sunday Evening, Week 3

I told Grandma about Bruno and the paper full of circles. She was very interested in the drawing and asked how many rows we had managed. When I told her about the twenty-first row, she laughed and said that she had spent her whole working life as a bookkeeper and that this was one of the oldest sums in the world, only in new clothes. Then she said, "I'll tell you about the beetles. Your brother would like this one too. Send it to him."

Grandma's Fable: The Tower of Beetles

In a summer meadow full of tall grass, a beetle with a shining green back climbed onto a stone and called to the others. "The best clover in the meadow grows beyond the tall grass," he said. "But if we stand on one another's backs, we can build a tower high enough to see the way. Whoever stands at the top will see the clover first. To join the tower, each beetle needs only to bring a sweet seed for the beetle above, and to find three new beetles to stand below."

The green beetle stood on the stone, and three beetles climbed under him and gave him their seeds. Then each of them found three more, and every new beetle brought a seed for the one above. The tower rose. The green beetle at the top grew fat on seeds and called down news of the clover: "It's so near now! Just a few more rows!"

At the very bottom of the tower, the newest beetles stood with their legs pressed into the dirt and the whole tower on their backs. They had given their seeds, and they had not yet found three beetles of their own. "Bring three more," the beetles above them said, "and you will move up."

A woodlouse who lived under the stone watched all this for many days. One evening she crawled up to a young brown beetle at the bottom and asked him, "Where does the clover come from?" "From beyond the grass," said the brown beetle. "And where do the seeds come from?" asked the woodlouse. "From us," he said slowly. "From the bottom." "And when there are no more beetles in the meadow to stand at the bottom," asked the woodlouse, "who will carry the tower then?"

The brown beetle looked around. He had already asked every beetle he knew, and so had the beetles beside him. There was nobody left to ask. That night a light wind came, and the tower swayed. At the top, the green beetle opened his shining wings and flew away with his seeds, and the beetles near him did the same. The tower came down in a soft heap, and the beetles at the bottom were left tired and bruised, with no seeds and no clover.

The woodlouse came out from under her stone. She helped the brown beetle onto his feet. She did not say a word about the tower. She shared her supper with him, and in the morning she showed him a small patch of real clover at the edge of the stone, which anyone could reach by walking.

The top beetles had wings. That is what I keep thinking about. The people at the top of a tower like this always have a way out that the bottom does not have. And the woodlouse asked her questions not of the green beetle but of the brown one at the bottom, and she was still there afterwards to help him up. I think that is Lina's job now. Not to knock down Bruno's tower, but to ask him where the seeds come from and to stay nearby.

Wednesday Night, Week 4

Lina called Bruno tonight. She asked me to sit on my bed while she did it, not to say anything, just to be there. She had thought about it all day. She told me she wasn't going to send him the paper with the circles, and she wasn't going to say "pyramid scheme", because she knew how it would sound to him: as if she were calling him a fool. "He isn't one," she said. "He's the person who taught me what a battery really does."

So she said no, and she said it simply. "I'm not going to join, Bruno, and I'm not going to bring anyone in. But it isn't because of you."

He asked why, and he sounded hurt. She told him that she had looked for the club on the official register and that it wasn't there. Then she asked him one question, gently: where does his reward money come from? He started to answer with something about "the club's partners" and "the trading side". So she asked another: if nobody new joined from tomorrow, would the rewards still come? There was a very long silence on the call.

Then Bruno said, "You sound like my mum." Lina laughed and said that his mum was a very clever woman. Bruno said, a little angrily, that the people in the club had warned him about "negative people" and told him to "protect his energy" from them. Lina said, "I'm not negative. I'm your cousin. I just want to know where the seeds come from." Then she had to explain the beetles, and Bruno laughed, which was a good sign.

Before they finished, Lina said what I think was the most important thing. "If you ever want to look at it together, the register or the numbers or anything else, I'm here. And I'm still coming to your birthday, and I still want you to fix my old laptop." Bruno said, "All right. You still owe me for the radio." They were laughing again by the end, although he did not say that he would leave the club. When the call was over, Lina lay down on her back on the floor and said, "That was harder than my algorithms exam."

An hour later, Bruno sent her a message. He had asked his "team leader" where the rewards come from, and the team leader had told him not to "think small" and to "focus on bringing in new members this week". Bruno wrote: "He didn't answer the question." Lina showed me the message. I think Bruno already knew the answer as he typed it.

Afterwards Lina sat on the floor and worried out loud about the four people Bruno has already brought in. Some of them are his friends from work. "If it falls, they fall with him," she said, "and they'll be angry with him, and he'll feel terrible." We decided that she would tell Bruno, when the moment is right, that his friends can check the register for themselves too, and that if anyone has lost money, their bank and the official offices are the places to go first. Bruno does not have to fix it alone, and neither does Lina.

In Grandma's notebook I wrote down what I checked this week: where the money comes from, what is really sold, and whether the club is on the register. Underneath, I wrote something I didn't check but saw with my own eyes: you can say no to the club and yes to the person. Lina did both in one phone call. I want to learn how to do that.

What I Checked This Week

Where does the money come from? This is the first question to ask about any club, scheme or "opportunity" that pays rewards for bringing in new members. If the rewards come mainly from the joining fees of newer members, then it is a pyramid scheme, and it must collapse, because the number of new people it needs soon grows larger than the number of people who could ever join. Drawing the rows on paper made this clear in a few minutes, without any special knowledge. The people who lose the most are always the newest members, at the bottom.

What is really sold? A real business sells something that people would buy even if there were no rewards for recruiting, which means bringing in new members. If the "product" is thin, overpriced or easy to find for free, and all the excitement is about bringing in others, then the product is only a costume. What is really being sold is the right to bring in others.

Is it on the register? If a club says that it invests money or helps its members invest, look for it on the official register of the office that supervises banks and investment firms, and on that office's warning list. Find the office's own website yourself, use the exact company name, and use nothing that the club gives you for the search. Bruno's club was not on the register.

And then there is the thing that isn't on any register. It is possible to say no to a scheme without saying no to the person. Lina asked Bruno questions instead of giving him answers. She did not call him names or call the club names, and she made sure he knew she would still be there. I think that will help him most when he is ready.

Things to Talk About as a Family

The diary rests here for the week, with Lina lying on the floor after a hard phone call. Schemes like Bruno's often travel through families and friendships, because the people who join them truly believe in them and want to share something good with the people they love. That is what makes them so hard to refuse, and why it matters so much how we refuse.

Here are some questions to share. If a relative you love asked you to join something like this, what would you say, and how would you want them to feel afterwards? How could you find out together where the money in a scheme really comes from? And what is the difference between saying "That's a scam" and asking "Where does the money come from?"

One small thing to try together: take a sheet of paper and draw Lina's circles. Start with one person, give each person three new members, and keep going row by row until the paper is full. Then talk about how it felt to watch the rows grow, and about which row you would be in if you joined today.