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7 Of The World’s Strangest Ponzi Schemes

Crime Zone Jan 29, 2023

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Chapters:

00:00 – Intro
02:55 – Pigeon King International
04:10 – RelyAid
05:24 – MoneyTron
06:37 – Mutual Benefits Corporation
08:21 – Greater Ministries International
09:33 – Susi Emu Farms
11:21 – Yilishen Tianxi Group

Though you may not have heard of the man himself, chances are you’ve heard of his namesake crime. A Ponzi Scheme is a form of fraud where investors are lured in with the promise of high profits, and work by paying earlier investors with the money from more recent ones. The scheme works as long as there is a constant flow of investors and most still have confidence in the business and in do not demand full repayment.

Despite not being the first person to commit such a crime, con artist Charles Ponzi’s name became synonymous with this kind of fraud due to the notoriety of his case.

In the 1920’s, Ponzi scammed investors out of more than $20 million using a fraudulent investment opportunity involving postal reply coupons. It started when Ponzi noticed a legitimate loophole. The coupons, which were intended to be used to obtain postage stamps to reply to international mail, could technically be exchanged for a higher value in the U.S. than their country of origin. Ponzi sold this idea as an investment opportunity, offering clients a 50-100% profit if they would give him the money to buy these postal reply coupons. The scheme was far from realistic, as Ponzi never figured out a way to convert the coupons to cash efficiently. It is estimated that in order to actually make a profit, Titanic-sized ships filled with postal coupons would have had to have been shipped to the US from Europe. Despite this, the money kept rolling in, and Ponzi found that for the most part he could cover the old investment profits with the money from new investors, as most people kept reinvesting their money anyway. During his scam he lived lavishly, spending the money of his investors before the operation collapsed.

The size and damage of these schemes has only continued to grow since the days of Charles Ponzi, with the largest such example being the 2008 case of Bernie Madoff, which is estimated to have resulted in losses around $65 billion. Though many of these Ponzi Schemes are relatively simple cases of investment managers promising returns that are too good to be true, there are some stranger Ponzi Schemes that have emerged over the years. Today we want to take a look at some of these strange cases, focusing on Ponzi Schemes from all over the world that in addition to being criminal, are also pretty bizarre.

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