The Underground Railroad Review: Slavery exploitation gifting
Amid the worst global pandemic in a century, one group of scammers in the US are targeting the newly unemployed for a secret gifting scam.
And they’re not above shamelessly exploiting slavery either.
To the best of my knowledge The Underground Railroad doesn’t have a web presence. At least not a public one.
The scheme is promoted in secret via webinar, one of which is the source material for this review.
The specific recording we’ll reference going forward features a woman going by Jessica Watson.
Watson claims to be a New York resident and mother of four.
[14:48] I’m an IT professional of twenty-two years. My education is in information systems management and organizational management.
I’ve held top secret clearance for the government. I’ve also held a real-estate license for ten years. I’ve bought (and) sold rental properties even before having a license.
Watson opens up her The Underground Railroad pitch by addressing the name of the scheme.
For those unfamiliar with US history, the Underground Railroad
was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, and used by enslaved African-Americans to escape into free states and Canada.
It is on this premise of “saving others” that Watson shamelessly launches her gifting scam pitch.
[0:45] The Underground Railroad really stemmed from just our ancestors.
And I’m just gonna note Harriet Tubman, I think we all know the history there, and how she risked her life over and over again to save others, to bring others along with her.
I believe that we shouldn’t leave anyone behind in something good.
A few minutes later into the presentation, Watson reveals The Underground Railroad is specifically targeting newly unemployed as a result of COVID-19.
[2:46] You share this blessing with two people.
Now what is two people? Two people is nothing.
I know you have more than two people in this world that you love, and that can use an additional $3500 a month. Especially in this time and age.
I feel for so many of the business owners and small businesses, and the workers who have lost their jobs due to this pandemic.
This is coronavirus proof. This is pandemic proof.
So what exactly is The Underground Railroad?
It’s a simple 2×3 matrix gifting scheme.
You sign up for $500. People are directly or indirectly recruited after you, with each gifting $500 for a matrix position.
You steal $3500 off the bottom level of your matrix, with the remaining $500 gifting payment used for re-entry into a new 2×3 matrix.
Instead of just coming clean about this, Jessica Watson explains fraud away with “flowers”.
The water drop in the middle is the top position in the matrix. The earth icons are the two positions on the first level. The wind icons are the four positions on the second level and the fire icons round out of the fourth level.
If the names Watson has given these positions feels manipulative, it’s because it is.
Evidently aware what she is promoting is an illegal scam, Watson dismisses the fact The Underground Railroad is a gifting scam as “miseducation”.
[17:29] I have a four-year old son on this flower. Show me another college plan that has this type of return.
My entire family is in this. So do not come to me being miseducated.
What this boils down to is the cliche “eVrErYtHiNg Is A pYrAmId ScHeMe!” nonsense.
And The Underground Railroad isn’t a Ponzi scheme because participants are aware they’re simply stealing money from those recruited after them.
Because y’know, that’s how the law works. So long as you know and acknowledge you’re committing a crime, the rules don’t apply.
If I may;
The Underground Railroad is an MLM gifting scheme, which incorporates elements of both pyramid and Ponzi schemes.
First off cash gifting as a business opportunity is illegal. This is not the same as gifting money to a friend or family member for their birthday etc.
In cash gifting schemes new participants gift funds to existing participants. These payments qualify them to receive payments from those recruited after them and so on and so forth.
When you give Bob a $20 for his birthday, that’s where the transaction ends. And this differentiation is what makes scams like The Underground Railroad illegal.
Why? That brings us to the pyramid and Ponzi elements.
MLM gifting schemes like The Underground Railroad rely on perpetual recruitment of new participants. This is the scheme’s only source of revenue to fund $3500 gifting payments.
If recruitment stalls so does The Underground Railroad’s matrices, prompting a collapse.
The Ponzi nature of the business exists within the context of $500 in and $3500+ out.
Effectively The Underground Railroad initial $500 gifting fee is a buy-in. Once a set number of new investors are recruited and invest, you cash out $3500 over.
This process repeats itself until The Underground Railroad inevitably collapses.
The use of funds paid in by new participants to satisfy existing participant’s withdrawing $3500 a pop is precisely the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
Participants knowing they are involved in a scam doesn’t make any of this legal.
Despite Jessica Watson’s flowery language, pretty diagrams and assertiveness, The Underground Railroad is just another matrix gifting scheme.
At any given time the majority of participants will not have recouped their $500 buy-in. It’s mathematically impossible, ensuring that when The Underground Railroad collapses, the majority of participants will lose money.
In contrast, scammers like Watson and whoever is running this mess are part of the small group that profit. Gifting scams are a zero-sum equation, so this happens at the expense of everyone else.
In summary The Underground Railroad combines shameless exploitation of slavery, COVID-19 economic victim targeting and an illegal gifting scheme.
I know things are tough out there but please don’t fall for garbage like this. Scammers like Jessica Watson should be more than ashamed of themselves.
I must be too stupid for pyramid schemes, because I didn’t understand from her explanation (admittedly, I skipped through a lot of it) how this is supposed to work. I couldn’t figure out how the money is meant to flow up the pyramid.
Only after a bit of searching did I realize that nothing flows up the pyramid as such, everyone who joins simply pays the person at the top directly, the layers in between never see any money. Which does make it more like a Ponzi than a proper pyramid scheme.
Which begs the question: why would anyone bother to pay $500 to join one of these existing pyramids, then patiently wait until enough additional people have been recruited so they’ll finally make it to the top spot, the only one where they can hope to receive any money — when they could just as easily not pay anything, set up a new pyramid of their own, and have all the money flow to them right from the start?
Even by pyramid scheme standards, the arithmetic is absurd. If you’re lucky, and you’re the last one to join at the bottom level so the pyramid splits, another 16 people must be recruited, two of them by yourself, before you’re finally at the top level and have a chance of seeing any money.
Then another 8 must be recruited who give you their money, for a total of 24. If you’re unlucky and you’re the first to join an empty bottom level, another 23 people must be recruited just to get you to the top, and 31 to finally get the promised amount.
If just one of these 16 to 23 people who join after you fails to find two new people willing to give $500 to someone else, you never even get to the point where you might finally start seeing some money.
My web search also showed me something else. That unusual terminology of the four ancient elements, earth, wind, fire and water, and calling the pyramid a “flower”, isn’t original at all.
This new-agey, “spiritual” facade added onto pyramid gifting schemes has been around for a couple of years. They often use terms like “lotus”, or “mandala”, or “fractal mandala” instead of “flower” (and the order in which the elements are assigned to the pyramid levels also varies).
Most of the search results seem to come from Australia, but there’s at least one instance of it popping up in Sweden.
Pyramids branded in this way seem to be mostly targeted at women. It looks like this Jessica Watson person is attempting a retargetting at African-Americans.
Underneath the flowers crap it’s a simple 2×3 matrix gifting scheme.
You fill your matrix, collect money from the third level and then get put in someone else’s matrix.
Recruitment of new gifting participants keeps the matrices from stalling. When that slows down everything stalls and it’s collapseville.
I’m sure there’s a website out there somewhere through which all of this is coordinated. Unless they’ve gone super secret and it’s a localized matrix they manually confirm payments through (matrix stored on the admin’s hdd offline).
I know that’s the term that’s used, but I am always irritated by this misuse of the word “matrix”.
A matrix has rows and columns, and a 2×3 matrix therefore only has 6 elements. All pyramid schemes have a tree structure, in this case a binary tree with a depth of 3, giving 15 elements.
It’s always been my assumption that a slightly more educated than usual pyramid scammer must have started using “matrix” incorrectly on purpose, to avoid the risk that somebody might look up what “tree” means in this context, and the diagram that inevitably goes with the explanation is so unmistakably pyramid-shaped.
A diagram of a matrix isn’t. That took off, and now they all just use the term without knowing what it actually means.
That the word isn’t “pyramid” is all that matters. The same reason these ones draw it as a “flower”, which is just a variant of what some others do, drawing concentric circles for the levels, with points on them for the nodes of the tree.
Don’t waste your time. Using misleading and inappropriate terms is a part of MLM underbelly aesthetic jargon.
You can call it “Matrix”.
Sounds so scientific, doesn’t it? And people like -ix suffix. Very modern and trendy.
Interesting thing… word “matrix” in this case is not translated to local (non-english) languages, but left as it is (although there is local term for the world matrix).
You can call it “filling and splitting the tables”. Tables are so friendly and community supportive!
You can call it “levels or structure”.
Easy to understand to anybody, Though not so impressive, but fairly fine.
Filling the “spheres with planets” or “flower with names of elements” is quite esoteric and unusual – but why not?
But for Gods sake – avoid the term pyramid!
MLM has it’s own lingo. Try not to read too much into it.
I had some chucklehead try to convince me his scam wasn’t MLM because it used a unilevel.
Uni = one, so how can it be a multi-level scheme he said (yes the scam paid out across multiple levels).
This crap has been around for a long time.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane_game
Sadly, many people – desperate people who can least afford it – will be hurt.
Jessica should go to jail, but she probably won’t.
Who wrote this?
It seems that there’s a lot of “speculative” verbiage in this — they “think” and “it seems like” but there’s nothing definitive that says they “know” or they “have experienced” and it is written to scare off those who may be interested in finding another way forward, but will trust “everything they read on the Internet” (and yes – even this so called “report” instead of trusting their friend or family and ultimately themselves).
And yes, I am writing from a position of “knowingness”, not guessing or speculating…
(Ozedit: derails removed)
This review is based on The Underground Railroad’s business model. There’s no need to speculate, it’s a simple matrix gifting scheme.
The word “think” appears once in this review, directly quoting Jessica Watson.
The phrase “seems like” doesn’t appear anywhere. I.e. you’re full of shit.
Cool story. What was your point, that your a gifting scammer?
Kinda already figured that since nobody else is going to make excuses for shamelessly exploiting slavery to pitch cash gifting.
This thing is all over the place right now. Preying on the stimulus checks and tax returns of unbeknownst people trying to move forward in life, it’s disgusting.
Use any other name but why tarnish the historical relevance of what The Under Ground Railroad has meant for a people.
Harriet Tubman desire for others and herself to be free came with the cost of maybe being captured and reentered into a condition of slavery worse than before or loss of ones life which may have been better.
but she ended not with a pool of money for her many trips but instead the reward of getting people to a place where the struggle of life maybe a little better but the weight of slavery was no longer a cage with no hope.
Thank you for this information!
You sound like a hater. You call it a scam because you said it eventually will collapse. But you never spoke on the thousands of people who have already gotten so much money over and over.
Just as long as the board is full with people, it will work. It will collapse when it runs out of people. That could be years from now.
There’s billions of people on earth and this has been around for a long time. Way before any stimulus money. You’re trying to provoke people by hating on the name.
What’s wrong with family and friends gifting each other? Because the recruits are family and friends exchanging funds.
You mad cuz black folks caught on and are making money by sharing money. Oh I’m pretty sure you will remove some of my comment. So I’ll screenshot it.
Because math guarantees that the majority of participants in a gifting scheme lose money.
Arguing for scams based on when they will collapse is missing the forest for the trees.
Math doesn’t care whether you scam your family, it doesn’t care about your race, and it doesn’t care what you name your scam.
You are a disgusting human being. Feel free to screenshot that.
Great point Oz. I am black and I agree with you. Like I have heard in the streets growing up – “All Money Aint Good Money” and to quote an old African Proverb – “The Want of A Thing is Often More Than It’s Worth”.
Yes, some may be making money now but at the cost and expense of those down the road. Kind of like our Ancestors working hard to ensure we have a good life and future and freedom but now we are living in danger and fear of our own people both on the streets and in the church.
In this instance your victim in allowing you to do it because of miseducation. The world is full of people who listen to a good story and not research on their own.
I have read all of the comments about how people think that the Underground is a scheme. What was it called when (Ozedit: derails removed)
I say, if you are being successful with the method of sharing, then you go ahead and build wealth within your community and family. If you chose not to do it, then fine, it’s not for you.
As with anything, there will be good and bad who attempt to take advantage of others. (Ozedit: more derails removed)
If you can’t afford to lose $500.00, then don’t risk it. Just the same as investing conservatively in stocks.
Let people live and leave them alone.
This review is on The Underground Railroad, a gifting scam. Attempted “whatabouts” re. Wall Street, the Chinese, stocks etc. etc., do not excuse or justify The Underground Railroad being a gifting scam.
Gifting schemes are illegal. And what kind of schmuck pushing a gifting scam, in which the majority of participants are guaranteed to lose money, onto their community and family?
What a garbage human being you must be.
There is nothing “good” about gifting scams. Anyone who promotes them is “taking advantage of others” by stealing from them.
Scammers, meet flashlight. Run scammers, run.
The Underground Railroad? If it is the one I think it is,
drive.google.com/file/d/16rIdeY2y8O2xcGhoQIMkaXm5JIMl-fww/view?usp=sharing should provide the names and phone numbers of the admins running it.
They sent it to me in a spam email for some reason a few days back.
Let me see… Linda Dillard and Woody Williams. They are about an hour and 16 minutes into the deep crap.
So Jessica is 22 years old and she’s had a real estate license for ten years!?
They’re handing out real estate licenses to 12 year olds now? Loool. Nearly spat out my drink.
How do you, report these people if you have fallen for this scheme???
I am embarrassed to say I have and brought family members in and they have lost money and I feel obligated to repay them. I joined a friends and family share program and it seems these people in the Underground Railroad are operating openly.
Not only with this scheme but charging a fee to administrate the flowers and a monthly fee for software.
How do I get people their money back now that I know this is a ponzipyramid. I am truly embarrassed and have to explain to friends and family that I was not diligent enough to recognize this as a scam.
I am truly pissed off and I will proceed with doing all that I am able to stop the originators of this particular gifting scam.
Fortunately only about 25-30 people were brought into this scam because of me the unfortunate part is I do not have the funds to pay all them back immediately.
I found out of this being a scam when I made the decision to admin my own flower and realized after my flower had split, and two more flowers had began and started to split that someone will always be loosing without more people coming in and even then if 100,000 people were getting paid it would be more than twice that amount who would loose out on getting paid.
It can never be self sustaining so people in the outside say if the whole world were doing this loose their money.
So upset with myself and have undoubtedly lost trust from people who trusted that this was legitimate because of me. If you have any info on how I should proceed any advice would help. Thank you.
Unfortunately the money of the people you recruited is gone. That’s how a gifting scheme works.
You can report The Underground Railroad and whoever recruited you to the authorities. Enough people have to do it though for an investigation to go anywhere.
I was invited by friends in May 2020 & received a zoom link for the presentation. The presenter was Linda Dillard who mentioned Woody Williams.
Linda not only desecrates the name of the Underground Railroad, but she also misrepresents the practice of Sosu.
Due to the fact that the friends are always involved in a get rich quick endeavor & has a history of not being financially honest I refrained from joining until I could research it further. I also wanted to find out if it was possible for the flower to close & remain closed… it isn’t possible!
In May I could not find any information on the Underground Railroad gifting circle. I googled Linda Dillard & Woody Williams and could only find job history on Linda Dillard. The Georgia mobile she provided matched what appears online.
Basically, I could only find articles on similar types of gifting circles, looms, or flowers. Basically, they are illegal in the US, and there’s the issue of not paying taxes.
Linda misleads others by stating you don’t have to pay taxes on a gift up to a certain dollar amount per year. Technically she is correct BUT a true gift isn’t something you expect to “regift” in return over & over. So taxes will have to be paid.
Even if you claimed the amount you earned from the gifting circle,Ponzi schemes & pyramids are still illegal. The moment an individual recruits another person to join and that individual pays his or her money the recruiter is guilty of the crime.
I warned my friend that this is illegal but I was informed that it isn’t illegal & they received partial payment of the $3500.
As you’ve sussed out, all gifting schemes are illegal in the US.
Also with respect to taxes, participating in an illegal gifting scheme is different to gifting an individual funds without strings attached (birthdays, Christmas etc.).
This is a very interesting thread indeed. I can tell you that I have been gifting in to the prosperity flower for over 2 months now and have had tremendous success financially for both myself and my wife.
I have not seen one single person lose any money and I have seen a heart-filled group of people supporting each other through the process of gifting and receiving.
It’s a positive group of people who support each other and support the circle as a whole.
Everything I’ve read so far in this thread is based in fear and lack and limitation, gifting circles are about abundance and sharing and pulling people up and pulling each other up out of poverty and into abundance.
I have seen a few people leave the circle because they freaked out for reading articles like this. And what I’ve witnessed at their leaving is that the group finds someone to take their position, and so that they are gifted the money back before they leave. So I have not seen one person actually lose any money on this.
This group is of high integrity, high values and all about everyone winning. This absolutely works and every word that you guys have said above is based in the old paradigm of people stealing from each other people getting more for themselves and trying to rip other people off.
The prosperity flower is nothing like that, it is all about integrity and groups of people coming together to help one another rise up over a system that’s really stacked against all of us.
If you think about the systems of debt that (Ozedit: derails removed)
I have witnessed an incredible amount of sacrifice, dedication and integrity in this group and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to read everything above these as someone looking at it from the outside.
I am from the inside and I’m telling you with 100% certainty and 100% integrity that this thing, it works and it’s not a scam.
No one is doubting The Underground Railroad as a gifting scam “works” or not.
Clearly it does, in that new victims’ money is funneled to existing affiliates such as yourself.
Math is math though, and gifting schemes over time create a larger amount of people who will lose money.
Whether you choose to acknowledge the inevitability that gifting scams such as The Underground Railroad enrich a small number of participants at the expense of the majority, is neither here nor there.
Facts are facts, and the Underground Railroad is an unsustainable gifting scam. The is zero integrity in pretending otherwise and recruiting new victims into scams.
Mathematically impossible. The money has to come from somewhere. Logic 404.
This works. ..
I know for a fact everyone who has something negative to say is a sore ass loser. Never shoukd have given $500 from their rent to gamble on a possibility. Same ppl will go to las vegas and blow the bag.
There is a lot of pain around money and ppl of color. Its a damn shame that so many ppl will make an adult decision about their money….then turn around and hold someone else accountable for that decision.
Has anyone considered how much money ppl have been able to collectively pool? How about looking at a positive perspective instead of being victimized?
How you do one thing is how you do most things. And that poverty stricken decision making process im sure looks familiar in various aspects of ones life.
Dont be a victim! And ppl unable to get 2ppl is interesting when you have 1.2 million IG and FB followers. Stunting but cant get ppl.
Enough….just keep waiting until Nov 3 waiting for a handout when you could be collectively doing for yourself.
#blamegame
Gifting schemes “work” in that scammers such as yourself are able to steal money from people who join after you.
Stop making up facts about other people and focus on not being a garbage human being.
So how about not being a scumbag and making it worse by stealing from them?
Great advice. The best way not to be a victim of gifting scams like The Underground Railroad is not to join them.
#enoughexcusesownbeingathief
Wow, what some negative energy here coming from the OZ side.
So, I’m an insider and I never felt such a warm-hearted, loving, supporting community. It’s not about money and it’s actually about rising up and changing the financial system as we know it through the power of each of us.
Of course the officials don’t like to see this cause they for sure not want us to be financially free.
Yes, probably there where concepts like this which fell apart cause of people being greedy and selfish, operating out of their ego minds. But there are indeed communities which operate from the purest intentions with all their integrity, watching out for each individual which decides to join the movement.
We are the change we want to see in the world. So we must act and trust and see where it will lead us too.
It is important when people decide to leave the community to give them the gift back. And this is being practiced. So nobody can say they lost their money to a scam.
I feel truely very sorry for all the people who may have done so but I believe those communities where not operating on their higher self level yet. We all still make mistakes and we are all still learning.
So, yes, let’s see what happens if the whole world transforms into a gifting community. I’m very curious. Maybe this has the potential to change everything for the better.
And yes if it happens that there are no more people to join, then we give the people who didn’t receive, their money back. What’s the problem with this?
Peace out
Oh please shut the fuck up. Every gifting scheme is about you stealing money from unsuspecting victims.
Good grief.
Math and reality is the problem.
Gifting schemes are a zero-sum equation. Every dollar you steal is someone else’s unrecoverable loss.
Over time the number of victims increases. You, The Underground Railroad and your bullshit pOsItIvE eNeRgY aren’t above math or reality.
Marie, please educate me:
If you get a bunch of people together and get them all to agree to send each other money …
… and each of those people expect to get more money back than they gave away …
… WHERE does all of that extra money (“profits”) come from?
Once you finish my education on the above question, could you please tell me how that will “change the financial system as we know it”?
Thank you so much.
SD