Ben Schott has a really fun piece in the New York Times about the “Shifters,” a mysterious pyramid scheme that spread virally among Flappers in that decidedly pre-Internet year of 1922. It promised “something for nothing,” but worked inversely to that credo as all pyramid schemes do. An excerpt:

“By mid-March, the press was reporting who it thought the Shifters were and what it guessed they were up to — though the picture is fragmented and contradictory.

For example, The Providence Evening Tribune asserted that “the fad started at Hanover in the room of an ingenious minded Dartmouth student of psychology,” whereas The News Sentinel blamed ‘Boston high school debutantes,’ and The Pittsburgh Press blamed high school students in New York.

What is clear is that the Shifters had no structure, no leader and no politics — other than an apparent sympathy with another nebulous group of convention-defying jazz-age women: the Flappers. (The Shifters were often classified as a subspecies of Flapper.)

Central to the Shifters’ rapid growth was a pyramid scheme of enrollment and enrichment that was encapsulated by the Shifter motto,’Get something for nothing.’

A Shifter would tempt a victim into joining, swear her to secrecy, make her pledge to ‘be a good fellow’ and demand an initiation fee of anything from 5 cents to $6. The newly minted Shifter was then dismissed to find fresh victims and make good her investment.

According to The Border Cities Star, ‘down in New York one stenog. cleaned out 1,200 persons in the Woolworth building offices during her membership campaign, and naturally collected 1,200 dollars.'”