In 2013, a friend told me about this amazing opportunity at Amazon. Regular people were making a killing selling all kinds of stuff on Amazon like eye masks, water purifiers, and oven mitts. These sellers were so excited, they wanted to share this information with you. All you had to do was buy their course for around $2500, they would teach you all the secrets. And then you could be rich like them, too!

This was my first encounter with what I call the “Early and Lucky” scheme. And while it’s not quite a scam, it comes close. 
Here’s how it works.

When Amazon first opened up its marketplace to outside sellers in the year 2000, some people got in early and tried it out. They’d find a product in someplace like China, and they’d post pictures of the product on Amazon. Anytime they sold one, they’d just get it drop-shipped from China.

These Amazon sellers would do this with tons of products, and sometimes one of the products would get super popular, and the money would roll in. 

These early adopters put out a bunch of products and got lucky with a few of them, and they made a pile of money. Good for them! But as the years passed and more and more people and companies got in on the game, there was more competition. And just 10 years later, in 2010, the sales weren’t what they used to be.  

So what these sellers did was create a course on how to do drop shipping on Amazon, and they started to sell that. The problem was that unlike the person buying this course, the seller was early and lucky, and the same conditions that made it possible for them to get rich a few years ago, just didn’t exist anymore.

My friend and I knew a couple of people who had plonked down $2500 for the course, but after many months of diligently following the instructions, none of them had made more than a few hundred dollars. This, after many hours of looking for products and posting pictures and doing all the things the course said to do, following it to the letter. This is because, 10 years after Amazon Marketplace opened, they were no longer early, and were competing with so many other sellers that luck was hard to come by.

The Early and Lucky game plays out in lots of ways. In the 1970s, you could pick up a townhouse in the Back Bay in Boston for around $25k. By 1985, those deals were gone, but people who spotted it got in early, and made a nice packet of money. In New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina, you could pick up a house for $20k, spend $10-$50k fixing it up, and sell it for $150k, but those deals came and went by 2015, ten years later, they were gone.

Around then, I started hearing about these courses you could take to make fast money with real estate in New Orleans. My neighbor took one of these courses for $400. He got all excited at first, but then decided it was all just a bunch of BS. The opportunity had passed. It was too late to be early, but that didn’t stop some vultures from swooping in and creating a course about it and taking peoples’ money.

By the time someone creates a course on a get-rich scheme, there’s no more money in it. Funny that way, huh? 

Multi-level marketing schemes, or MLMs, are another example. The premise sounds okay, on the surface. You sell some stuff, like makeup or kitchen gadgets or cleaning products, and you make a commission on everything you sell. When you join up, you become part of a team, with a leader that helps you figure out how to sell stuff, like tells you how to hold parties or contact friends or whatever.

The teams are organized in a pyramid, and your team leader makes money when you make money. The team leader tries to have like 10 or 20 people under them, so they make lots of commissions. The leader is called your “upline”, and you are their “downline”. Your leader is probably also part of someone else’s downline, and that person is part of someone else’s downline. 

The people at the top got in early, and managed to get a big downline. They were also lucky to get in on a product line that sells pretty well. You, on the other hand, are late to the party, and you’ll probably never hit six figures in sales.

You might think, well, so what? If you’re having fun selling stuff and making a few dollars, that’s fine. And you’re right, that would be fine. But a lot of MLMs do stuff like, they require you to buy a certain amount of stuff every month, even if you’re not selling. Or your upline tells you that you have to buy the company’s $100 course on selling, and if you don’t do it, they threaten to stop helping you. Meanwhile, the company might change the formula or manufacturer and the product goes downhill, and you’re stuck trying to sell crappy stuff.

So what starts out as a fun way to have parties and sell makeup or leggings becomes a losing proposition. Between putting gas in the car to visit customers and having to buy stuff that never sells, you end up $500 or $1000 in the hole. Meanwhile, your upline is buying their second Mercedes.

Maybe one day you’ll find that Early and Lucky opportunity. But if you do, it won’t be from a course offered on Instagram or TikTok. By the time anything is posted there, millions of people have heard about it. You’ll hear about it from a friend, or by keeping your eye on the market. That’s where all my Early and Lucky opportunities have come from.

Get-rich schemes are soooo tempting. It’s easy to get so carried away on the dream that you don’t look too closely. But you can find a ton of information for free on the internet, so use that resource before you slap down a big fee for the supposed get-rich secrets, or invest a bunch of money in some scheme you don’t really understand. You are smarter than you think. You can make your own decisions about this stuff. And whoever’s selling it to you can’t really explain how the money gets made or it seems too good to be true, then run away. And take your cash with you. 

Want more? Check out the episode Easy Money! Get Rich Schemes in Season 2, Episode 15 of the How Hacks Happen podcast.