Recently I came across justbeenpaid and was both intrigued and skeptical of it. This was something that I wanted to believe worked. As I’m not familiar with the details and history of these types of programs – though I know what a pyramid scheme is – I likely would have put money into it. As it so happens I didn’t have the money at the time.

I decided to go ahead and take the “free” $10 that they offer so that new members may see the system working for themselves. It’s not until you actually accept the money that you get a message saying something like “You will be required to repay this $10 within the next few weeks or months”. Two red flags there. First, it seems rather dishonest they they would keep hyping the money as being free only to say “By the way, we’re going to be debiting your account to get our money back at some point”. The second is that (as far as I’ve seen), they don’t actually tell you when they’re going to want it back. After some searching online it appears to be sometime in the middle of the first 75 day cycle. Probably just long enough for the earnings to add back up to the original total. I don’t have a problem with that. It was the lack of disclosure that I have an issue with.

Another major red flag that came up for me was when I was playing with their calculator (http://tripler.justbeenpaid.com/calculator/). To the inexperienced and/or naive, some pretty tempting numbers can show up. But as for me, I like to really look at several different variables and inevitably, see how far these things can go. So I put in $100 for the initial funding, told it to compound the earnings (every $10 is put back in), and set the end date for 2022, their furthest available year. By the end of the first cycle the daily earnings are about $8.00. Not bad for doing nothing except for logging in to compound the money everyday.

Let’s go to day 309, when the earnings hit $100/day. (It would actually be later than this due to currently slightly lower rates on weekends and the occasional “restart”-more on this later-but anyways). The total earnings are projected to be at about $8500. Now, as the money’s been repeatedly put back in up until this point you’d have to wait until it built back up in order to actually take out that amount all at once. But as the point of this program is to take out only some earnings while compounding the rest, it’s likely a moot point for most. The daily earnings is what members are encouraged to pay attention to.

As time passes daily earnings increase a little more each day assuming the money is being put back in. (Let me just point out here as to avoid confusion, you still earn interest even if you don’t compound any of the earnings. It just means a significant difference in the size of the profits). Day 509 brings the $1000/day mark with a total of over 87k. Day 570, $2000, total 176k. All this assumes that the program holds up. Which, considering that only $100 was initially put in, and no other outside funds were used, it’s hard to believe that this much interest would be accrued in only a year and a half.

So my question is this: what product or service is being offered to supply these earnings? Aside from a few options to upgrade that must be renewed every 75 days, and the ability to “sponsor”, aka recruit new members for your matrix downline with the hope that they’ll pay a fair amount into the system, I couldn’t find much information. Without getting directly involved I’ve only found vague references to a traffic exchange and “surfing requirements”. So if a lot of members are regularly paying to put up their own ads (if I understand correctly), then that could potentially provide a reasonably sized source of funding. But this is still for just a single member with a single $100 deposit.

Now there are some failsafes put into the program in order to sustain it. For example, they have what they call restarts whereas if withdraws exceeds deposits, a temporary hold is placed on all current funds until the people in charge decide that it’s safe to again allow withdraws from earnings gained before the freeze. As new cycles can still be started with newly added money I assume that this doesn’t take too incredibly long. Another protective measure-at least it could be perceived as such-is that they encourage members to avoid taking out so much that their daily earnings decrease. Plus it’s not normally possible to take out all earnings at once.

Even with this said let’s go back to the calculator. Three years in from the original deposit of $100, no other outside funds added, putting all earnings back in everyday. Daily earnings: $700k. Total: $61m+. Though it can be argued that most members if not all would be making regular withdraws long before this point, therefore drastically reducing total earnings gained, it’s still a lot of money for the system to be putting out. Even with the multiple programs that are claimed to be capable of backing each other up.

I would be willing to really test justbeenpaid for myself – especially the jss tripler program – except that I question the legality of the whole thing. I don’t want to get involved only to be accused of taking part in a ponzi scheme later on.

The one thing that keeps me from outright calling this a ponzi scheme is that members can put their own money into their matrix positions if they decide to take advantage of the matrices in the first place. This takes away a part of the need to endlessly recruit new members. So I’ll give them that much. This isn’t nearly enough to convince me that the system is sustainable though.

And finally, as for the calculator with it’s ten year projection:

Daily: $4,706,796,866,498,861,056
Total: $412,445,727,685,819,891,712

That comes down to quintillions (trillions using non-U.S. scale) of dollars.