Just Say NO! to Christmas Pyramid Schemes

Ok friends I’ve been seeing these going around on Facebook recently and felt like it needed to be addressed.  Let’s start by explaining what this is – a friend posts that they’re looking for people to participate in a gift exchange.  The idea is that you just buy 1 gift (in this case valued at $10+) and send it to a particular person, get 6 friends to participate and in return you’ll get 36 gifts from other people!  Totally reminiscent of those postcard chain letters that we’d do back in the 80’s & 90’s, and it sounds harmless and fun right?

It sounds great, but let’s think about how this works.  You send your gift to your friend’s friend (whoever included them in the gift exchange) and you’re now out the $10 for the gift.  You now have to find 6 friends who want to send a gift to your friend, and they’ll find 6 people to send a gift to you.  Easy peasy.

So, I did some maths (ok, so Microsoft Excel did some maths… I just entered in a formula) – for the first person there obviously just needs to be 1 person to decide to start the chain.  For the second level there are that person’s 6 friends.  They need to come up with 36 people.  Those 36 people then come up with 216 people, and so on and so forth. I put this in a visual format.  We’re going to pretend that you did not initiate this “gift exchange” and that you aren’t friends with the kind of person who would initiate this – remember: the first person didn’t give *anyone* a gift… they’ve just decided that they ought to receive a gift from 36 of their friends friends just for sheer awesomeness.  So I’ve put hypothetical “you” at the second tier.  I’m not sure whether that makes you really lucky to be so high up in the pyramid (and more likely to have a non-exhausted list of people who would participate, or really unlucky to be so closely connected to the kind of person who thinks scamming their friends for their gain is fun.  You can decide.  I put in the number of people who would have to be participating at each level to sustain the exchange, and some interesting comparisons for what that number of people means to the right.

Sorry, I’m no graphic designer, but the numbers are staggering.  For there to still be 36 participants at the level that would send gifts to you there would have to be more people participating than were killed in the sinking of the Titanic.  For those people to receive the promised gifts would take more participants than would fill Yankee Stadium.  It only takes 11 tiers to exhaust the total US Facebook user population, and another couple tiers beyond that and it would take more than double the world’s population to fulfill the promises of 36 gifts being sent – and neither of those lower two tiers would receive any gifts.

The entire success of this “exchange” is built on the fact that the majority of people who participate will get nothing.  There’s no way for you to get 36 gifts for just sending 1 gift without 35 people sending gifts and not getting any gifts.  Hopefully that helps you understand why these are a bad idea.  Beyond which, they’re actually illegal.  So please friends, just say NO! to these gift exchanges!  If you want to get into the holiday spirit how about spending that $10 on buying supplies for refugees, or if you really want to send someone a gift you can always check my Amazon wish list 😉  

Sources:

• Median Number of Facebook Friends
• Titanic Death Toll
• Las Vegas Hotel Capacity
• Yankee Stadium Capacity
• US Cities by Population
• McDonald’s Employees
• Donald Trump’s Twitter Followers
• Facebook Users in the US
• Number of Christians Worldwide
• World Population