The Dare to be Great con was a Ponzi scheme that developed in Florida in the 1970s. I believe it had something to do with cosmetics, a franchise marketing arrangement like AmWay or several others common at the time, where you bought in and later moved up the hierarchy by hiring people to work for you, and so on.At each level, you took a percentage of the profits made at the levels below you, but it was only at the lowest level that you were actually going door-to-door
selling product which you had purchased with your own money, while the levels above you collected a share of your profits.

At any rate, the scheme collapsed, and thousands of people were left holding the bag, and basements full of cheap cosmetics you couldn't give away.

There's nothing new about this sort of thing, although the marketing model is legitimate and is used by many real companies, this one was just too good to be true. The organizer and a few of his cronies at the top got rich and thousands of others took a financial bath.

I was a graduate student at the time, but I was earning my living as a blue-collar worker, drawing contour maps from aerial photos. When the news broke that the State had busted this guy's operation and the extent of the fraud was exposed, my fellow workers were delighted, not that he had been stopped, but by how he had conned his marks and taken them for a fortune. I was appalled, thousands of hard working people, blue collar workers like us, had mortgaged their homes and borrowed thousands to get a chance at being big-time operators. And they were wiped out. My co-workers were rooting for the con man, fantasizing about how they would have run things differently---and not gotten caught. They were not celebrating a successful business gone awry, they were applauding how this "businessman" had managed to con working people out of millions.

I learned a big lesson out of that. The American Dream of owning your own business and getting rich by providing a great product for your customers and a great living for your employees coexists with the fantasy that people are stupid and greedy so they DESERVE to be conned. And the guy who cons them is someone to be emulated and respected, a hero. And my co-workers weren't greedy bourgeois capitalists, they were solid proletarians, real working class heroes. You won't find these guys in Ayn Rand's fiction.