Some just don't get it

On Sunday afternoon, my wife went to the laundromat next door to the Zeekler headquarters building on Center Street. She couldn't believe what she saw on the Zeek building's window

As we now know, Zeek, the penny auction that promised riches, has been shut down by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an alleged $600 million Ponzi/pyramid scheme that lured in perhaps as many as a million participants worldwide.

This message was posted at the Zeek HQ.

And yet, posted on the building's window, was a handwritten message on lime-green florescent posterboard with this message: "We forgive you. Please restructure and save our Dreams! (signed) Zeek affiliate."

Really?

In reading comments at the end of most online stories about Zeek's demise, the company's defenders have castigated just about everything and every government agency in sight, including the SEC.

Meanwhile, there's a willingness to forgive the very agency that takes their money, promises rewards with 1.5 percent daily interest that is funded mostly by its newest affiliates — the people most likely to be burned when the pyramid collapses.

Unbelievable. Zeek good. SEC (and therefore U.S. government) bad. Yikes.

Some folks, no doubt, were so enamored of the scheme that it's likely they even took out five-figure loans to buy into the program. But buy into what?

I'm trying not to be too hard on most of the people who bought into this. Several are my good friends and I hope they recoup their losses. This is, after all, a hard economy we're living in. The promise of a better financial future may have been too much to resist. I cannot fault what most likely is human nature.

But human nature sometimes includes fraud and deceit and that's where you have to be wary.

For an excellent analysis and overview of the whole sordid mess, see here. Checking the reader comments at the end of the Hub Pages review is interesting, too.

It's a sad story, indeed.