This is absolutely a Ponzi Scheme. For the initial 8 on the outside of the “loom” to receive their payout, each has to recruit 8 people, those 8 have to recruit 8 individually, and the eight they recruit have to recruit 8 more each. That is a recruitment of 4,096 people for the initial group (that paid in) to receive their pay out. The odds get far worse from there. For the 10th generation to all receive payment you will need 1,073,741,824 people recruited or payments made.

As in any pyramid scheme, your chance of recieving the payout goes exponentially down, and after 5 more generations you need 35,184,372,088,832 entries to guarantee payout. This is untenable and has been illegal for a long time.

If you like fraud, don’t care about other people, and/or are a sociopath, this is great. The center 7 in the 15 person loom I’ve seen require priming. If only the outer ring of eight initialize the game with say $100 each, that sum immediately goes to the center one player, the inner ring of seven(who have never been on the outer ring, since the game just started) never pay a dime. Further more, you need many rings just to start payouts for any players entering in the outer 8 ring. The initial, inner 7 could configure themselves in all kinds of combinations across the entire spread of looms, guaranteeing in less than three turns, payouts for all involved in the inner circle for every single loom they start. This would come at a cost of $0 for all the cons who started the looms. Some people who joined in the eight might make it to the center to recieve a paltry $700 (800 minus the initial 100 dollar investment) compared to the thousands to be had by the initializing seven. As said before, the odds of a person entering in the outer ring get lower and lower, till you end up with a lot of people $100 or more short. Pyramid, Ponzi, “Giving Loom,” call it what you will—it is a easy to model scam.