On 7 April 2022, a third workshop was organised by leaders (Poland UOKiK and Ireland CCPC) of the ICPEN Pyramid Promotional Schemes project. The meeting entitled 'Education and information empowerment - campaigning and advocacy on pyramid promotional schemes' attracted a lot of international interest, with 73 logged participants from all over the world.

The external session featured invited speakers:

• Jamie Bartlett - journalist, author behind the BBC podcast ‘The Missing Cryptoqueen’ (United Kingdom). The topic of this presentation was “OneCoin – A story of greed, deception and herd madness”;

• Hannah Martin - mentor, campaigner and activist, founder of Talented Ladies Club (United Kingdom). Her topic was: “Responding to the threat posed to women by MLMs”;

• Claudia Groß (Gross), Ph.D. - Nijmegen School of Management, Radbound University (the Netherlands), whose presentation was titled: “Lawful but awful. How multi-level marketing companies are structured to avoid existing rules and regulations”.

Representatives of consumer authorities from: Poland (UOKiK), South Africa (The National Consumer Commission) and Ireland (Competition and Consumer Protection Commission) spoke at the internal session. Their presentations covered the topics:

• How to inform on pyramid promotional schemes?
• Consumer empowerment in relation to pyramid schemes;
• Use of social media and communication campaigns against pyramid promotional schemes.

The last segment of the workshop provided time for discussion among the event participants.

The Pyramid Promotional Schemes project was initiated by UOKiK and started in September 2021. The project's objectives include the identification of pyramid promotional schemes in various jurisdictions and the exchange of best practices in dealing with them (also taking into account different legal contexts). A series of four online workshops open exclusively to ICPEN member states will be vital to achieving the stated project objectives. Workshops covered: case law, law enforcement and sanctions, and allowed interactive and good communication between participants in studying the problem and finding solutions to combat pyramid promotional schemes.

First of four planned online workshops in the ICPEN project titled "Themes and trends among the pyramid promotional schemes” was held on 26 October 2021.The second workshop titled ”Enforcement pathways and sanctioning policies” was held on 25 January 2022. Last workshop titled “Best practices in the enforcement of pyramid promotional schemes” is scheduled for the end of May 2022.