WA Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. The scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity, and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as new investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to own.
WA pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.
WCharles Ponzi was an Italian swindler and con artist in the U.S. and Canada. His aliases include Charles Ponci, Carlo, and Charles P. Bianchi.
WThe airplane game, also known as the Plane Game, was a style of pyramid scheme in the 1980s first active in North America and then in Western Europe.
WThe Albanian Civil War in 1997 was sparked by pyramid scheme failures in Albania soon after its transition to a market economy. The government was toppled and more than 2,000 people were killed. It is considered to be a rebellion, a civil war, or a rebellion that escalated into a civil war.
WAmber Gold was a Polish financial institution founded on 27 January 2009 by Marcin Plichta and liquidated on 20 September 2012. It was a pyramid scheme. In 2014, the District Prosecutor's Office in Łódź estimated the losses caused by its illicit activities at almost PLN 851 million.
WAmway is an American multi-level marketing (MLM) company that sells health, beauty, and home care products. The company was founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos and is based in Ada, Michigan. Amway and its sister companies under Alticor reported sales of $8.4 billion in 2019. It conducts business through a number of affiliated companies in more than a hundred countries and territories.
WClyde Edward Austin is an American former basketball player. Nicknamed "Clyde the Glide", he emerged as a prospect while playing for Maggie L. Walker High School in Richmond, Virginia, where he is considered one of the area's greatest high school basketball players. Austin played college basketball for the NC State Wolfpack and was an honorable mention All-American during his sophomore season. He was selected by the Philadelphia 76ers as the 44th overall pick in the 1980 NBA draft but never played in the National Basketball Association (NBA).
WBar Works was a New York City company that provided shared office space in a former bar and restaurant premises. For $25,000, investors could buy desks at Bar Works locations and then lease them back to the company. It has been noted that elements of the investment program are akin to a Ponzi scheme.
WBitconnect was an open-source cryptocurrency that was connected with the high-yield investment program bitconnect.co. After the platform administrators closed the earning platform on January 16, 2018, and refunded the users' investments in BCC, confidence was lost and the value of the coin plummeted to below $1 from a previous high of nearly $500.
WAmir Bramly is an Israeli investor and business man convicted of money laundering and fraud. He is the founder and former manager of Rubicon Business Group and "Kela Fund", and former partner in Hagshama fund. At the height of his career, Bramly controlled dozens of companies, and received intense media coverage both of his own dealings and as an interviewed expert.
WMaria Branca dos Santos, more commonly referred to as "Dona" Branca (1902–1992), was a Portuguese criminal known chiefly for maintaining a Ponzi scheme in Portugal between 1970 and 1984 that paid a ten percent monthly interest. During this time she became popularly known as "The people's banker".
WStanley Chais was an American investment advisor, money manager, and philanthropist. He operated "feeder funds" which collected money for funds related to the Madoff investment scandal. The widow, family, and estate of Chais settled with Madoff trustee Irving Picard in 2016 for $277 million.
WD.M.G. Grupo Holding S.A better known by its acronym DMG is a controversial Colombian company, intervened and disbanded since November 18, 2008 by the Colombian government, under the suspicion of money laundering and illegal money catchment by using the Ponzi scheme.
WFrank DiPascali, Jr. was an American financier and fraudster who was a key lieutenant of Bernie Madoff for three decades. He referred to himself as the company's "director of options trading" and as "chief financial officer". For a number of years, he played a key part in the daily operation of the Madoff investment scandal, later recounting how he helped manipulate billions of dollars in account statements so clients would believe that they were creating wealth for them. On August 11, 2009, he pleaded guilty to ten counts related to the fraud. He subsequently admitted that he had known for at least two decades that Madoff had turned his investment advisory business into a massive Ponzi scheme. He was denied bail before sentencing and spent ten months in jail before being released. He died of lung cancer in 2015 while awaiting sentencing.
WThe Freedom 251 is a smartphone that was initially offered for sale in India at the promotional price of ₹251. Sold by Ringing Bells Private Limited, and marketed as the world's cheapest smartphone.
WLeonid "Lyonya" Golubkov is a "common Russian guy" played by Vladimir Permyakov in notorious MMM commercials from 1992 to 1994. Due to a very aggressive advertising campaign by MMM owned by Sergei Mavrodi, most people know Vladimir Permyakov by this name.
WHerbalife Nutrition Ltd. is a global multi-level marketing (MLM) corporation that develops and sells dietary supplements. The company was founded by Mark R. Hughes in 1980, and it employs an estimated 8,900 people worldwide. The business is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, with its corporate headquarters located in Los Angeles, California. The company operates in 94 countries through a network of approximately 4.5 million independent distributors and members. John O. Agwunobi is the company's chief executive officer and executive chairman since March 2020.
WSamuel Israel III is an American-born former hedge fund manager for the Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which he founded in 1996.
WJan Lewandowski known professionally as Jan Lewan, is a Polish-American songwriter and polka band leader. Lewan's financial crimes were described by The Morning Call as a "classic Ponzi scheme".
WThe Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former NASDAQ chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
WBernard Lawrence Madoff was an American fraudster and financier who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion. He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He advanced the proliferation of electronic trading platforms and the concept of payment for order flow, which has been described as a "legal kickback".
WMake Money Fast is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter created in 1988 which became so infamous that the term is often used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam, or in Usenet newsgroups. In anti-spammer slang, the name is often abbreviated "MMF".
WМММ was a Russian company that perpetrated one of the world's largest Ponzi schemes of all time, in the 1990s. By different estimates from 5 to 10 million people lost their savings. According to contemporary Western press reports, most investors were aware of the fraudulent nature of the scheme, but still hoped to profit from it by withdrawing money before it collapsed.
WArthur Geoffrey Nadel was an American hedge fund manager, disbarred lawyer, piano player and philanthropist. In 2009, Nadel was indicted on fifteen federal counts of securities fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud. If found guilty, he could have been sentenced to 280 years in prison and would have been required to forfeit all assets connected to the fraud.
WOneCoin is a Ponzi scheme promoted as a cryptocurrency by Bulgaria-based offshore companies OneCoin Ltd and OneLife Network Ltd, both founded by Ruja Ignatova in concert with Sebastian Greenwood. OneCoin is considered a Ponzi scheme due to its organisational structure and because of the previous involvement of many of those central to OneCoin in similar schemes. It was described by The Times as "one of the biggest scams in history".
WLouis Jay Pearlman was an American record producer. He was the person behind many successful 1990s boy bands, as he funded NSYNC in their early years and is credited for creating the Backstreet Boys. In 2006, he was accused of running one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in US history, leaving more than $300 million in debts. After being apprehended, he pled guilty to conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding. In 2008, Pearlman was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He died in federal custody in 2016.
WQnet Ltd, formerly known as QuestNet, GoldQuest, and QI Limited, is a Hong Kong-based multi-level marketing (MLM) company owned by the QI Group. The company's products include energy, weight management, nutrition, personal care, home care and fashion accessories on an e-commerce platform.
WThe Saradha Group financial scandal was a major financial scam and alleged political scandal caused by the collapse of a Ponzi scheme run by Saradha Group, a consortium of over 200 private companies that was believed to be running collective investment schemes popularly but incorrectly referred to as chit funds in Eastern India.
WScentura also known as Scentura Creations is a perfume company based in the city of Chamblee, Georgia, within the Atlanta metropolitan area. It is a multilevel selling company which manufactures inexpensive imitations of designer fragrances. Independent salespeople are sent out, often in pairs, to sell perfume door-to-door, in parking lots, malls, or in other retail stores.
WLars Johan Magnus Staël von Holstein is a Swedish entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author who co-founded dot-com companies such as Icon Medialab and LetsBuyIt during the early dot-com boom in Sweden. He has been the CEO of the multi-level marketing company Crowd1, which has been identified as an illegal pyramid scheme in a number of countries. As of December 2020 he claims to have left Crowd1.
WTelexfree, a trade name owned by Telexfree Inc., was a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme disguised as an internet phone service company. Prosecutors have described it as the largest fraud of all time in terms of the number of people affected - more than 1 million, with victims in various countries. The brand became best known for its operations in Brazil held by Ympactus Comercial Ltda after it was involved in an ongoing investigation and trial for operating a Ponzi scheme, and later for having its operations suspended in the US by SEC under the charges of operating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi and pyramid scheme.
WFerdinand De Wilton Ward, Jr. (1851–1925), known first as the "Young Napoleon of Finance," and subsequently as "the Best-Hated Man in the United States," was an American swindler. The collapse of his pyramid scheme caused the financial ruin of many people, including famous persons such as Thomas Nast and the former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, who had helped him start his banking business.
WWallace Glenn Wilkinson was an American businessman and politician from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. From 1987 to 1991, he served as the state's 57th governor. Wilkinson dropped out of college at the University of Kentucky in 1962 to attend to a book retail business he started. The business rapidly became a national success, and Wilkinson re-invested his profits in real estate, farming, transportation, banking, coal, and construction ventures, becoming extremely wealthy. In 1987, he joined a crowded field in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. After running behind two former governors and the sitting lieutenant governor for most of the race, Wilkinson began to climb in the polls after hiring then-unknown campaign consultant James Carville. Wilkinson campaigned on a promise of no new taxes and advocated a state lottery as an alternative means of raising money for the state. Wilkinson surprised most political observers by winning the primary and going on to defeat his Republican challenger in the general election.
WThe Yilishen Tianxi Group was a Chinese company established in 1999 which sold traditional Chinese medicine products made from ants. More than one million people invested money in the company, purchasing and raising boxes of ants with the promise that they could sell the ants back for a profit, before it was exposed as a ponzi scheme in 2007.
WYounique is an American multi-level marketing company (MLM) that markets beauty products. The company was founded in 2012 by Derek Maxfield, who serves as CEO, and Melanie Huscroft, and is headquartered in Lehi, Utah. Between 2017 and 2019, Younique was 60% owned by Coty, Inc.