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
Read more about this topic: Pyramid Scheme
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
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“The white dominant culture seemed to think that once the Indians were off the reservations, they’d eventually become like everybody else. But they aren’t like everybody else. When the Indianness is drummed out of them, they are turned into hopeless drunks on skid row.”
—Elizabeth Morris (b. c. 1933)