"No, it's okay, you can trust us! Yeah, invest in us and we'll be sure to keep you updated on our product as it continues development." Alyssa pauses, hearing a confirmation from the customer that they'll send over the money shortly, and finishes off the call, "Thank you so much! Have a wonderful day."

Alyssa turns to her business partner and long-term girlfriend, Michelle, "We got another one."

"Everyone says it's so hard to get people to invest. They're so wrong. We don't even have an actual product and the investors are just flooding in!"

Alyssa smiles, "Soon enough, we'll be able to buy our own private island!"

Walking out the door, Michelle says, "Let's make sure we pay off the car insurance first. I'm going to grab coffee, I'll be back soon!"

The door closes, and Alyssa is left alone again to her own devices. Perfect. She can finally make some of her own investments now that Michelle is gone. While Michelle doesn't trust Alyssa with their money, having had a slight gambling problem in the past, Alyssa knows that this is the right move; you can't make a large sum of money without properly investing it.

She pulls up a website on her laptop, and does a small amount before finding a perfect company to invest in. She purchases a couple hundred stocks to the company, and continues her research on other opportunities, forgetting all about the names of each company she purchases stock for the moment she closes the tab on them.

A couple weeks later, Michelle walks into the apartment on return from a nail appointment, a horrified look on her face as she screams at Alyssa, "What did you do this time? How much did you gamble? We just lost hundreds of thousands of fucking dollars, and I know it can't have been my fault!"

Alyssa says incredulously, "I didn't do anything, not with risk!"

"That means you did something."

"I've just been investing in stock!"

"I told you not to touch the stock market! You don't know how to do the proper research, and you end up losing large sums of money on loads of bankrupt companies!"

Alyssa pulls out her laptop to look at her stocks, and her stomach drops when she sees it. Only one company dropped in value. It dropped in value. All the way to 0.

She quickly searches what could have possibly caused this company to drop. There were loads of profitable investors involved; the stocks were worth loads, she had to blow a lot of money to purchase those stocks.

She finds it instantly. The company was running a Ponzi scheme. Their product was never real. All the money they ever made went straight back to the previous investors. There was never a single amount of true profit for the company.

Alyssa whispers, "Michelle... it was all one stock. They were running a Ponzi scheme."

"What the fuck is a Ponzi scheme? And how did it lose us all our money?"

"It's what we're doing. The product they claimed to manufacture wasn't real."

Michelle pauses. She walks to the couch, sits down, puts her head in her hands, and whispers, "What if that happens to us? Our company could go bankrupt. We could lose everything."

Alyssa has a feeling that they already have. They have no money now, and they're going to have to keep paying the investors back. It's never going to end, and they're stuck. They either dissolve the company... or they try to keep it up.

She only hopes that she can enjoy it while it lasts.