Word: ponzi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Albert Meyer, an accounting professor at Spring Arbor College in Michigan, did not believe in Bennett, however, and therein lies the tale of how an elaborate Ponzi scheme came unraveled, leaving Philadelphia, Wall Street and the cozy world of nonprofit organizations reeling in embarrassment...
Bennett was only doing what Charles Ponzi did in Boston back in 1919, paying back one wave of investors with money he received from ensuing waves. Like Ponzi, Bennett was something of a civic hero for a while, and like Ponzi, he was careful not to draw attention to himself with a flamboyant life-style...
Then came the painful lesson: things too good to be true usually aren't. Last week investors learned the hard way about the old-fashioned Ponzi scheme. MMM suddenly collapsed. By week's end thousands of investors swarmed around its Moscow offices, trying to redeem their pieces of paper. Many of the shorn had come from the Moscow Commodity Exchange on the other side of town, where windows were broken before they were told to try their luck at the company headquarters instead. On Saturday that market evaporated when the company folded up shop, and shares that had dropped from...
Vasiljevic had little trouble meeting the interest payments at first. Western experts say his bank ran a classic Ponzi scheme, using new deposits to pay the interest on old ones. At the same time, diplomats say, Vasiljevic used his customers' hard currency to buy sanctioned goods like oil on the black market and sell it for a handsome profit. Vasiljevic denies all the charges. "The wonderful thing about sanctions is that they create real profit opportunities," says a State Department official. "When you have these rates of inflation, anytime you can use someone else's money for a short time...
Prosecutors say McNamara was running a gigantic Ponzi scheme, covering bad loans by taking out bigger ones. He was charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, and faces a possible prison sentence of as long as 30 years. McNamara has pledged most of his wealth -- including homes in New York and Florida and a private jet -- to make bail, set at a stunning $300 million...