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I recently heard about HYIP for the first time and did some reading - the amount of self-deception I saw was breathtaking. There were even sites that rated HYIPs by their "investment" structure and current payout status. People knew it was a Ponzi scheme and still believed that they could profit.

Truly, money eats brains.

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Those HYIP forums felt, to me at least, like it was Ponzi meta-investing. Many of the HYIPs paid out for a little while to encourage more 'investments'. So the part of the game was to get into early ones, but then get your money out before it closed.

So there were absolutely no differences to "normal" Ponzi schemes, except the participants went into into fully knowing what it was, but believing they knew how to beat the odds.

Maybe those were fake profiles generating confidence among potential 'investors' / marks?

I uh... think I may have supplied one of those operators with software to automate payments. It was all rather arms-length and I didn't enquire, but it involved paying out interest to hundreds of e-gold accounts. And I got paid well.

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