For several weeks now a beauty product that almost by magic leaves the skin smooth, soft and fresh it goes around on social networks. Many well-known influencers promote it as a dermatological miracle and it’s actually just a scam. This leather machine costs around 21 thousand pesos but the same and exact machine of another brand on some Chinese pavadine shopping page comes between 5 and 11 dollars. So what’s the difference between them? Why is it a scam? Why do many influencers, models and journalists recommend it? The truth is that what is sold, is not only this product that is a very cheap random product that they charge you very expensive, but also they propose you a kind of entrepreneurship and business in which, you as leader, as long as you get many customers, you will be filled with silver. You don’t just sell the miracle machine, you’re an entrepreneurial and empowered woman. Does it ring a bell from somewhere? Perhaps the famous fabrics of abundance come to mind? Well, sure. Yes. It’s pretty much the same. But to understand a little more why it is a fraudulent business and why we are the women who fall into it, Filo.News spoke to economists Gonzalo Finlez, Candelaria Botto and with the cosmetologist and network content generator, Daniela López. Modern colorful mirrors
“It’s a scam because the product doesn’t matter, what matters is reselling it, creating work teams, never a reseller talks about the characteristics of the creams, for example, the ingredients and benefits, nor why the machine is different from the thousands of machines that are in the rest of the world and come out a tenth of what the machine costs” , supports specialist Daniela López. Daniela denounces many months ago from her social networks to the company and its perverse sales mechanism. “It’s very horrible to see thousands of women getting in debt believing that with the sale of this product they will progress, it’s very painful,” she adds distraught. “This case is one of the many belonging to a variation of the pyramid scam, known as multilevel marketing. For the scheme to work, new participants need to be entered continuously. What distinguishes such schemes from, for example, a loom from abundance, is that there are products that are marketed. However, the existence of tangible products is only an illusion, because the only thing that makes ‘business’ profitable is the recruitment of new victims,” explains the economist Finlez.When the trap has a woman’s name
Flower that represents the scheme of the looms of abundance.
But why do we fall? While priamidal scams do not distinguish from gender, from a time to this part many of them sinisterly use speeches of feminists to catch their victims. Empowerment, overcoming, independence are some of the characteristics you’re going to get if you manage to sell many of these expensive machines. This product is mainly focused on women since skin care is a sayo that, culturally, we have been able to accommodate for decades. The beauty market has a gender and hundreds of victims are now challenged and, above all, indebted, with this kind of deception. “The point is that we have fewer opportunities in the labor market, unemployment rate and higher degrees of informality, and we also earn less. So by having fewer opportunities in the formal economy, when these empty promises appear, in the face of a lack of opportunities you can understand that it falls more easily,” Botto adds. It is that of course, we earn less, we solve many more tasks at home than boys (76% to be more exact) ergo, we have less time and fewer opportunities when it comes to becoming economically independent, how it will not sound tempting. “They tell you that you can be your own boss, that you don’t have to depend on your husband, that you can be the one who has the highest income in the house, you will be empowered, many times the ones that are in the groups and are ‘the bosses’, show their vacation in the Caribbean, saying that you can get to that,” says Lopez, my idol, scammer?
One of the reasons this product works is because it has influential women from all over the world as spokesmen. In our country, models, actresses and instagramers with more than 5 million followers and followers, promote it. “I was offered to do it and I refused, but I think it is because the profit margin is very wide, like the loom, in this case, if you have an account with 6 million followers, with me buying you 1% a machine that in the market comes out 5 dollars, the profit margin is spectacular,” explains the cosmetologist and adds categorically: “But if you’re an influencer you don’t fall for this, you’re complicit in this, because it takes five minutes of research into Google to realize that the profit is at the expense of other people’s loss.” The truth, besides, is that it’s not just any time. The coronavirus pandemic has the whole world paused, and the economic crisis that it generates and will generate makes the desperation for extra income enormous. “Statistically, everything that is a pyramid scam, flourishes in times of crisis. When people don’t know what to do to generate money and if they’re recommending it to me influencers with millions of followers, actresses, known people, obviously they won’t want to fuck me up, it’s impossible for me to be a scam. A look at an influencer as a model, that combination for me is lethal,” Lopez says. People who tell their experience report that they were never able to recover their initial investment. That is, the ‘managers’ at the top of the pyramid generate income at the expense of the money that victims contribute,” adds the economist, referring to the complicity of influential people about the scam. “It breaks my heart to see girls who write to me every week to tell me they went into debt so I could buy the machines. And above all it breaks my heart to see that most of them are women,” Lopez concludes.
