Charles Ponzi was a smart man.

Ponzi was born in Italy, and moved to America, in 1903, with just $2.50. He was a seasoned conman, and started to work his magic straight away.

He created a company that would buy international reply coupons (think of a cheaper version of a postage stamp) in one country and then exchange them for more expensive stamps in another country.

A migrant who went to America to live out his dream of running a business. But this was not his real business…

This business was just a cover for something more sinister.

Ponzi went to investors promising returns of 50% in just a few weeks and he delivered. People couldn’t believe it

That’s impossible. No market on Earth has been able to produce returns like that?

But “impossible” was not in Ponzi’s vocabulary. His plan was genius

Suppose somebody invested $100 and then the next person invested $200. You could give $50 from the second person to the first person. The first person has gained a 50% return.

The Ponzi Scheme was born.

More and more investors invested in the company and Ponzi kept rearranging the money. He was nicknamed the “Italian financial wizard”.

At his peak, Ponzi was making $1 million a day, but he realised that if people stopped investing he wouldn’t be able to produce the returns as he would run out of money and his scheme would collapse.

Ponzi planned his exit to run away with all of the money. He hired a publicist by the name of William McMasters to write about Ponzi’s company so that he could cover his tracks. But… McMasters saw through Ponzi’s plans

McMasters famously said

“The man is a financial idiot. He can hardly add”

McMasters tipped off regulators and they raided Ponzi’s office. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Today, the Ponzi scheme is one of the most common cons and it shows people will do anything for money.

CHARLES PONZI SPENT TIME IN PRISON BEFORE HIS FAMOUS SCHEME.
Ponzi was no stranger to crime before concocting the scheme that made his surname infamous. Not long after arriving in Boston, he moved to Canada and got in trouble for forging checks. He spent two years in a Canadian prison for his offenses. Back in the U.S., he served a term in federal prison for illegally transporting five Italians immigrants across the Canadian border. It was only after his so-called Ponzi scheme began to crumble that his criminal history was made public by journalists, thus speeding up his downfall.

CHARLES PONZI GOT RICH OFF THE POSTAL SYSTEM.
In 1920, Ponzi discovered the key to the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme: an international postal reply coupon worth $.05. It had been included in a parcel he received from Spain as prepayment for his reply postage. Thanks to an international treaty, the voucher could be exchanged for one U.S. postage stamp worth a nickel, which Ponzi could then sell. Ponzi knew that the value of the Spanish peseta had recently fallen in relation to the dollar, which meant that the coupon was actually worth more than the 30 centavos used to purchase it in Spain. He took this concept to the extreme by recruiting people back home in Italy to buy postal reply coupons in bulk from countries with weak economies, so that he could redeem them in the U.S. for a profit.

CHARLES PONZI SWINDLED $20 MILLION FROM INVESTORS.
Ponzi technically wasn’t breaking any laws with his postal service transactions, and if he had kept his idea to himself he would have gotten away with it. Instead, he turned his small money-making operation into a wide-reaching scam. If people invested money into his “business” of cashing in foreign postal vouchers, which he dubbed the Securities Exchange Company, they would get their money back plus 50 percent interest in 90 days. The deal was too good for many investors to pass up.

It was also too good to be true: The money wasn’t being used to buy coupons overseas. Ponzi kept most of the investments for himself and used the flood of money coming in from new investors to pay off the old ones. Many investors were so thrilled with their returns that they invested whatever money they had made back into the business, which helped Ponzi keep the sham afloat.

Ponzi was finally rich and famous, but soon enough, cracks in the scheme started to form. The Boston Post launched an investigation into Ponzi and revealed that in order for his business to be functional, he would need to be moving 160 million vouchers across world borders. There were only 27,000 postal reply coupons in circulation at the time. The final blow came when the publicist he had hired to represent him came out against him to the public. His system fell apart and it was revealed that he had stolen $20 million from investors.

Because he had lied to his clients about their investments through the mail, Ponzi was ultimately charged by the federal government for mail fraud. He served three-and-a-half years in prison and then served an additional nine years for state charges.

CHARLES PONZI DIDN’T INVENT THE PONZI SCHEME.
Though Ponzi schemes were eventually named for him, Charles Ponzi didn’t invent this type of scam. There were many crooks before him who used the same method to exploit investors. Charles Dickens even wrote pre-Ponzi Ponzi schemes into his 1857 novel Little Doritt.

It’s possible that Ponzi got the idea for his own fraud from William F. Miller, who pulled a similar stunt working as a bookkeeper in Brooklyn in 1899. But it was the highs of Ponzi’s success—and the lows of his demise—that made his story so memorable.

https://basetimes.com/2020/05/04/what-you-dont-know-about-charles-ponzi-of-the-ponzi-scheme/