Word: ponzis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That the e-mail came just days after Wall Street trader Bernard L. Madoff had been accused of running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme—the largest in history by a single individual—made Flier and Kahn immediately suspect that something was amiss. The doctors were on their way to meeting to present the results of their diabetes research thus far to Picower, whose foundation supported the work...
...York Anatomy of a Scam Celebrated money manager Bernard Madoff was arrested for allegedly bilking investors out of up to $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme described as one of history's largest swindles. The scam's blueprint hasn't changed much since Charles Ponzi's 1920 fraud: 1 Entice investors by promising an unusually lucrative rate of return. 2 Use a portion of the raised capital to pay out early dividends, thereby giving the appearance of legitimacy--which in turn attracts more investors. 3 Pay off earlier investors with money accrued from later victims. 4 When no further capital...
...Ponzi was a charismatic Italian immigrant who, in 1919 and 1920, coaxed thousands of people into shelling out millions of dollars - including a staggering $1 million in a single three-hour period - to buy postage stamps using international reply coupons. This strategy, Ponzi promised, enabled one to purchase postage at European currencies' lower fixed rates before redeeming them in U.S dollars at higher values. "For instance," Zuckoff explained in a Dec. 15 article for FORTUNE, "a person could buy 66 International Reply Coupons in Rome for the equivalent of $1. Those same 66 coupons would cost $3.30 in Boston," where...
...Ponzi, who was released from prison and deported back to Italy in 1934, set the standard in the genre. But the golden age of Ponzi and pyramid schemes didn't arrive for decades. (The two highly similar cons are often conflated, though in Ponzi schemes, a ringleader facilitates the entire enterprise; in a pyramid scheme, rungs of collaborators recruit new investors.) In the boom years of the 1980s and '90s, as traders developed increasingly sophisticated investment vehicles, the cons cropped up with increasing regularity. In 1985, a San Diego currency trader named David Dominelli was revealed to have fleeced more...
This ignominious group has had some high-profile recent entrants, including Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu, who was charged in October with operating a $60 million Ponzi fraud, and former boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, who in addition to foisting N'Sync on an unsuspecting public also stole $300 million in investor capital over two decades. Earlier this month, Minnesota businessman Tom Petters was indicted by a federal grand jury on 20 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering stemming from his alleged role in a 13-year, $3.5 billion Ponzi ring. Still, the $50 billion fraud Madoff allegedly perpetrated...