The term “ponzi” was named after Charles Ponzi, an italian immigrant who began creating a pyramid scheme that turns out to be a scam in 1919.

In the world of High Yield Investment Program (HYIP), a lot of these programs claim to be having external income from FOREX and other investment scheme. The fact about these programs is that these are just Ponzi’s or in short, they are dressed up to look like real High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP). No matter how nice, fancy and convincing their websites with detailed information about how they earn from external investment scheme, they almost all rely on the new spends to pay the older spends.

Even though there is no official figure on the ratio of real HYIP’s compared to the HYIP’s that are Ponzi’s, it is estimated that it could be around 99% of these programs are Ponzi’s and only 1% are real HYIP’s.

How could you tell if that program is a Ponzi?

Here are some guidelines that you might consider in determining a program if its a pure Ponzi.

• A daily payout of 1% and above
• A monthly return of 20% or above
• Low initial investment (ex. $1)
• No real identity of the admin or the company (no real photos or location of the office/s)
• Payouts even on weekends where markets are closed.
• High referral commission (10% above indicates that they need members to promote for new investors)

Some of the above guidelines might be true on some real HYIP’s, but take note that you can never be sure if its going to run away (SCAM) sooner or stay for long. After several months on different programs, I’m sure you’ll get the real taste and be aware on these Ponzi thing in the HYIP arena.

So before getting into the game, you must first know the game and be able to play the game wisely in order to succeed or in other words make money on these programs.