A fraudulent scheme in which people are recruited to make payments to the person who recruited them while expecting to receive payments from the persons they recruit; when the number of new recruits fails to sustain the hierarchical payment structure the scheme collapses with most of the participants losing the money they put in

A fraudulent business practice involving some form of pyramid scheme e.g., the chain of distribution is artificially expanded by an excessive number of distributors selling to other distributors at progressively higher wholesale prices until retail prices are unnecessarily inflated