It’s barely a new calendar year in the financial world and Wall Street bloggers have already found a ridiculous new stock for investors to waste their money on.

The company is Herbalife Limited, and what’s not to love? It’s a nutrition company boasting weight loss results for its customers, and its stock last year grew 139%… and, oh, that’s right, their former hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, accused them of running an illegal pyramid scheme.

Pyramid schemes, often referred to as the more palatable “multi-level marketing strategy” are notorious for scamming people out of their money with empty, get-rich-quick promises. Sales managers buy inventory from the parent company and recruit direct sales people to sell it for them. In a pyramid scheme it becomes easier and more profitable to buy more product and recruit people to sell it for you than to sell the product itself. It’s a process that gains company profit while workers suffer the losses.

While illegal, pyramid schemes are hard to prosecute, partially because the Justice Department refuses to define laws against them. Whether Herbalife is an illegal pyramid scheme remains to be seen, but it’s a problem when a company with such a sketchy reputation is so highly touted by Wall Street.

JP Morgan Chase also roared out of the gates this year by breaking the $20 billion mark…in accumulated fines and levies over a 12-month span.

Our government works best in hindsight, so these fines are for JP Morgan’s moves prior to the 2008 financial crisis that may have played part in the historic collapse. Prime examples include assisting Bernie Madoff in selling off the gains of American’s saving accounts as gains of his company and helping inflate the housing market bubble through its sales of bad and misrepresented loans to investors.

Don’t worry about JP Morgan though. They’ve been putting away $28 billion into legal reserves since 2009.

If the actions of JP Morgan Chase don’t serve as an example of what risky and uncertain investment can do, we might be in trouble. Too often, actions that may otherwise seem unethical or illegal in our civilian world are passed off as a good business move to save a quick buck on Wall Street.

A company called Blackstone Group exemplified this all too well when, late last year, they bought debt that a Spanish gaming enterprise, Codere, owed to a 3rd party lender. At the same time, they loaned Codere $100 million and insured the debt they now owned (but did not owe) against overdue payment. And that’s precisely what happened. Codere missed a debt payment, and Blackstone collected $15.6 million in insurance payment. After  earning a new client, alongside a cool $15 million, Blackstone showed how to systematically get away with insurance fraud.

Unfortunately for us common folk, we would probably go to jail for even conceiving such a ploy because years ago, corporations realized that individuals might take advantage of this by destroying their insured assets to collect on the policy. Actions by our government suggest that harm to corporations is more important than to its citizens. Until the jurisdiction of our Justice Department can reach Wall Street as well, our money will always be susceptible to risky and unethical business practice.

brjthomp@mavs.coloradomesa.edu