Word: scheme
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Emily Medina isn't running a pyramid scheme, despite what people often think. As the petite 26-year-old works her way through some of New York City's poorer neighborhoods, she approaches women selling food and trinkets on the street and offers to lend them money to grow their businesses. The organization Medina works for, Grameen, is one of the world's largest microfinance outfits and has a Nobel Prize to its name for this work. But in New York neighborhoods where loans to street vendors tend to come with interest rates north of 40%, it can take...
...consecutive congressman, first disgraced Representative Mark Foley and then his successor, Tim Mahoney, who lost his re-election bid in November after admitting to having multiple extramarital affairs and paying hush money to one of his former mistresses. And Palm Beach was the winter home of alleged Ponzi scheme leader Bernard Madoff, who found many of his allegedly bilked investors in the area...
...equity firms, where partners are expected to regurgitate past earnings to make good on unmet promises to investors. And wherever outright fraud can be proved, those who benefited can be forced by the courts to disgorge their gains--as investors who withdrew money from Bernard Madoff's apparent Ponzi scheme before it collapsed might discover in the coming months...
...methods and motives remain cryptic, but the carnage unleashed by Bernard Madoff is beginning to be revealed: in a New York City federal court, where the former Nasdaq chairman stands accused of masterminding a $50 billion Ponzi scheme; in congressional hearings; and in the Manhattan office of a French financier who killed himself after Madoff bilked him and his clients out of more than $1 billion...
...netted $500 million in a 1990s fraud that promised God would double the money of pious investors. Boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, in addition to foisting 'N Sync on an unsuspecting public, stole $300 million from clients over two decades. And citizens poured some $1.2 billion into Albanian pyramid schemes after the fall of communism; when the schemes collapsed in 1997, investor outrage toppled the government. Still, Madoff's $50 billion scam would be the biggest ever--except to those who say the risky trading in mortgage-backed securities was a Ponzi scheme of its own. The price...