h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

AMWAY is the biggest pyramid scam ever and it is legal because they pass along cleaning products as well as money. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA is owned by AMWAY as well as Michigan's Republican Party.

And the thing which marks it out as a pyramid scam rather than a genuine sales operation is that all the promotional activity focuses on signing up new recruits, not promoting the product.

They call it "Multi-Level Marketing," and get most offended if you denounce it as a pyramid scam, but it certainly is one IMO.

Remember the love bug? That email virus with the subject line ILOVEYOU?

What it did do was forward itself to all your contacts. Effectively it was a pyramid scheme chain email except people were helping it along without knowing it.

Its payload was not very serious but the damage was caused by the sheer amount of network traffic it created. The number of people catching it grew exponentially and so did the number of copies of it being emailed around. People ended up with hundreds of copies in their inboxes before their email servers finally gave up and crashed.

BBC News says that it crippled 45 million computers worldwide.

And we run Lotus Domino mail servers and Notes mail clients, so (a) the virus didn't execute on our PCs and (b) the server could have coped with it anyway. We really enjoyed the feeling of smugness.

Sounds like a nuclear explosion.............

I once saw a movie where they had a room full of mouse traps with two ping pong balls resting on the business end of the mouse trap. They threw one ping pong ball in and filmed it in slow motion.

They did that in a norwegian tv-program about physics "Fysikk på roterommet", to illustrate a nuclear chain reaction.