Is it a pyramid or a Ponzi scheme?

Search the project, company or platform being offered to you. We show which structural indicators it meets and which it does not, with the evidence in front of you, so you decide for yourself.

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Published cases
0
Active indicators
41
Rubric version
v5.1.0
Phase
Rubric validation
The two answers
example · rubric v5.1.0
4/100
No signals detected
Coverage 82%
The full rubric was applied. Not an endorsement and not a certificate.
This one gets published too. The signals were looked for one by one and did not show up. That is an answer, not the absence of one.
example · rubric v5.1.0
74/100
High structural risk
Coverage 68%
Signal index from the public rubric. Not a probability and not a legal verdict.
And this one gets published the same way. No faster, no higher up, no more eagerly: the same procedure and the same evidentiary demands.

The number is the Ponzi Signal Index: the share of the rubric’s weight whose indicators were confirmed by archived evidence. It is a reproducible measurement — you can recount it and reach the same number. It is not a statistical probability and not a legal determination.

Coverage always travels with the number, and it is what decides whether the number means anything. A low index at 20% coverage does not say “this is clean”: it says “we don’t know”. Below 40% we publish no index at all.

Illustrative examples. No real case has been published yet.

The scale
0–14
No signals detected
15–34
Minor signals
35–59
Warning signals
60–79
High structural risk
80–100
Critical signals
—
Insufficient evidence
NoteA pyramid and a Ponzi scheme are not the same thing, even though the words get used interchangeably. In a Ponzi scheme a central operator takes the money and pays earlier participants with what newer ones put in. In a pyramid, each participant has to recruit others to get their own money back. Many real schemes combine both, and the rubric measures indicators of each.

Look at the two ends of the scale, because they mean opposite things. “No signals detected” is a result: we looked, and there were none. “Insufficient evidence”, by contrast, is never painted green — not having been able to verify something does not mean it is clean, it means we do not know, and saying otherwise would be the most damaging mistake we could make.
Most searched right now
The projects most people are looking up will appear here. When many people search for the same thing at once, it usually means something is going viral — which is exactly when an answer is needed, whichever answer it turns out to be.

This order is never a ranking of “the worst”: it is what people are asking about, and the list will hold cases with signals and cases without them side by side. Counts are aggregated per case and without identifying who searches — no IP, no cookies, no profiles.
Recently updated
Recently reviewed cases will appear here. A scheme changes its withdrawal rules, a regulator issues a warning, or an entity replies with evidence and its index drops. All of it dated and visible, including when the change is for the better.
What this is and is not
01
We do not accuse. We measure.We never say something "is a scam" or someone "is a fraudster" — a court decides that. We apply a public rubric and show the evidence.
02
A clean case gets published too.If the whole rubric is applied and no signals show up, that is published with the same priority as a severe case. If someone checks something legitimate and does not get a clear answer, we have failed them just as badly as if we had missed a scheme.
03
But "no signals" is not an endorsement.It means we found no signals on the day we looked, with the evidence available then. It does not guarantee legitimacy, it expires, and using it promotionally is prohibited. We certify no one.
04
We do not score people.The index always belongs to a project or entity, never to a human being. People appear only as a record of what they promoted publicly.
05
There is no money involved.No ads, no paywall, no sponsorship, and not a cent from the entities evaluated. No business model, because having one would make it corruptible.
How a case is evaluated
  1. Archive first, reason later — all evidence is captured and sealed with its hash and date before any conclusion. Schemes erase their tracks when they fall.
  2. The rubric is applied, indicator by indicator — each of the 41 requires its own cited evidence, to rule it out as much as to confirm it. Marking it "because it is obvious" is forbidden.
  3. A verifier tries to refute it — an adversarial pass tries to show the evidence does not support the claim. When in doubt, it refutes.
  4. A person approves it, or sends it back — nothing is published until a human opens the citations and checks they say what the dossier claims.
  5. The evidence stays public — screenshots, documents, transcripts and hashes, visible and downloadable. Verifiable without trusting us.
Open, and designed to be copied

Cases and their evidence live in a versioned repository rather than a database: every copy someone downloads is a complete archive with its history. If this domain disappears, the work does not. Copying this project is not merely allowed — it is the plan.

git clone https://github.com/Rastipunk/isitponzi.git
npm install
npm run build

No keys and no services to sign up for: the site is static and builds from the same repository.

The rubric is also published in machine-readable form: rubric-5.1.0.json — 41 active indicators, 10 families, total weight 278. With it you can recompute any published index without taking our arithmetic on trust.