Anyone heard of '21st Century Shop'?

[tequila]

A friend of mine told me about it. Usual spiel: it gives a ridiculous return on investment, it's not a pyramid, it's a matrix, it's a completely transparent organisation.

It gets its influx of money not from new users but from the natural mark-up of shop sales (purchased by, you guessed it, new users;)). lol

The twist is that they're claiming to have 'looked into a fair way of making a matrix style scheme work'. They also claim to have recruited people in high ranking jobs in politics and the police force - to the extent that these people have left their high-paid jobs.

It smells very fishy to me, and I'd like to do some research on it so that, if it's a scam, I can stop this person losing more money or convincing other people to. Unfortunately I can't find this organisation on the web anywhere.

Any clues?

[mercinary]

What is the website addy?

-Merc

[tequila]

Got it!

http://www.21cws.com/

It was 21st Century WORLD shop. :)

Looks very professional and slick (but I know how easy that is to do these days).

There are some interesting twists on the old theme - like the initial payment protection scheme. The fact that they only sell products to members worries me though.

1: Are they not confident enough in their own products that they can only sell to people who believe they'll get a vastly over-inflated return on their purchase?

2: How can this return be made when products are only sold to members? As soon as that limitation is in place, it becomes another mathematically unfeasible matrix scheme... Unless I'm missing something here?

What if you make the initial purchase/payment, get a return, then re-invest? You have no protection, and by the laws of the matrix, this second investment will take much longer, and is far less likely to give returns.

I'm very, very dubious, but I've only JUST started to look into all this stuff as a result of hearing about the shop. If anyone has any thoughts, comments, experience, etc., I'd love to hear about it.