Evaly, Dhamaka, and My Fifty Thousand Taka
That Evaly was a scam — I was sure of it from the very start.
There was an older bhai I knew, a distinguished Evaly investor — getting rich overnight buying bikes and ACs. He used to motivate me to “invest” in Evaly, to at least buy something; sure, the delivery came late, but he himself was living proof that in the end it did come.
But I didn’t buy a thing. First, it was an MLM — not hard to figure that out. The ones who get in first make money; the ones who come later are guaranteed to get burned. Second, even though Allah lets everyone else get away with their cons, every single time in this life that I’ve tried to pull a fast one, I’ve been caught.
I needed a camera back then. Fifty thousand in hand, the camera I wanted cost one lakh — and still I resisted the temptation of Evaly.
A while later, Dhamaka Shopping showed up in the market — same Evaly style. But logic said: if I’m its very first customer, there’s no chance of me getting burned. A calculated risk — and in the calculation, the derived value of the risk was close to zero.
I handed over my saved-up fifty thousand taka there to buy a one-lakh camera. The next week, Evaly got busted. The week after that, Dhamaka Shopping vanished too.
So I got burned even as a first-batch customer of an MLM. As I wrote earlier: Allah lets everyone else run their cons, but never mine.
Today I saw an arrest warrant has been issued against Evaly’s con man, Russel — but nobody even knows the name of Dhamaka Shopping’s owner.
Moral of the story: if you’re going to steal, do it at small or medium scale. Just like Major General Ziaul Ahsan went down, while the slightly smaller, mid-level army officers behind him faced nothing.