Pyramid Scheme - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Many Facebook games operate on a pyramid scheme system where you are greatly hindered in the game play unless you recruit your friends and family to play the game too.
• Stanton, a character of Charles Maturin's famous novel Melmoth the Wanderer, while put in Bedlam by his relative, finds a plan, written by some of his predecessors in the room he is placed. It is a plan of baptising all the population of Ottoman Empire, beginning with the Turkish ambassador, and is a classical pyramid scheme.
• The feature film Children of Invention tells the story of a mother who gets entangled in a pyramid scheme.
• The novel Welcome to the N.H.K. features a story arc wherein the main character is caught up in a crooked multi-level marketing scam called 'Mouse Road'.
• On the NBC sitcom The Office, it is revealed that Michael did not attend college because he lost all his tuition money in a pyramid scheme. At a later date, the same character unintentionally attempts to recruit members of his staff into selling calling cards, not realizing that he had been conned into a pyramid scheme until it is made clear by an employee.
• Season one of the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, features an episode in which Jeremy becomes involved in a pyramid scheme after being ignorantly drawn into it by his neighbor Toni, whom he's trying to sleep with.
• "The Fighter (2010 film)" features Dicky Ward attempting a pyramid scheme to help pay for his brother's training.
• In the Sitcom "Two and a Half Men" Alan runs a Ponzi scheme in the episode 'That Darn Priest' in the name of his chiropractor business until Rose finds out and threatens to tell all his investors if he doesn't stop