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In the process of investing, we should always be vigilant, a common "Ponzi scheme", which is constantly changing, has this bright and beautiful appearance. This is an old and common investment scam for the investment industry.

Ponzi schemes are an ancient and common type of investment fraud in which investors are deceived into investing with the promise of a high rate of return on their money, and then use the investment of later investors to repay the previous investors. At present, there are still many investors who go bankrupt every year due to Ponzi schemes.

Charles Ponzi was an Italian who immigrated to the United States in 1903. Worked in various jobs in the United States, including painters, and was bent on making a fortune. He spent some time in prison in Canada. Later, he discovered that the fastest way to make a lot of money was to engage in finance, so he came to Boston in 1919 and deliberately concealed his history.

He devised an investment plan to sell to the American public: he deliberately made a deal very complicated by claiming that he would make a lot of money by buying some kind of European stamp and selling it in the United States.

This was not enough to attract a large amount of investment, so he announced that anyone who invested would get a 50% return within 45 days, and it did deliver: the first investors did get 50% of the return. Over the next year, nearly 40,000 Boston citizens invested in Ponzi, mostly poor people with dreams of making a fortune. Pang Qi soon lived in a 20-room villa, bought more than 100 expensive suits, and bought countless jewelry for his lover, and became a top rich man.

However, paper could not contain the fire, and when he was unable to raise more money in return for his previous investors, his scam went bankrupt, and countless people's fortunes were wiped out in an instant. Ponzi was sentenced to five years in prison, and there has been a hoax named after him in history - Ponzi scheme.

Since then, Ponzi schemes have continued to play out around the world, with many variants and increasingly subtle methods, but there is never a shortage of fish that have been baited. One of the biggest frauds of all time, the Madoff Huge Fraud Case, involved $50 billion in funds, and its method of fraud was also a Ponzi scheme.

Bernard Madoff is a legend, chairman of the board of directors of the Nasdaq market, an advisor to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and has long been regarded as the founder of Wall Street. He set up an asset management company in 1990 and quickly grew to a large scale by raising funds through his network and introducing clients through his clients. On the surface, the foundation is constantly doing business such as buying large-cap growth funds and fixed stock options, and can guarantee monthly returns, so that for 20 years, rain or shine, he has guaranteed an annual rate of return of 10%-5%, and even in 2008, when the US Standard & Poor's index fell by 37%, it has also maintained this growth rate, which is impressive.

But as the crisis deepened, more investors wanted to be able to hold cash, and fewer and fewer people invested in Madoff, and eventually the capital chain went wrong, and finally the East Window incident. On June 29, 2009, Shoudolph was sentenced to 150 years in prison by the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York. The list of the biggest victims of this Ponzi scheme even includes HSBC, BNP Paribas, Spanish financial giant Santan Bank and other top international banks, these victims with rich professional experience perfectly illustrate the multifaceted nature of Wall Street. Had it not been for the financial crisis, Madoff's Ponzi scheme might have continued.

This kind of thing is not uncommon, such as in Shanghai in 2006 - a similar case:

Since 2002, the Shanghai offices of the two so-called overseas investment groups, named TOP and Pegasus respectively, have frequently appeared at major exhibitions in China to attract investment, and on the condition that billions of dollars of overseas investment funds are used as a condition, hundreds of enterprises eager to raise funds across the country have been attracted to negotiate with them on fund-raising matters. Who knows, the so-called overseas financing is actually just a front for a new type of scam. With this as bait, Top and Pegasus successfully defrauded more than 40 enterprises and institutions across the country of more than 760 yuan of so-called "translation fees", "evaluation fees" and "inspection fees".

After the report, the police quickly figured out the funds, carried out a new type of fraud to the deceived people, and took relevant measures against a number of people involved in the two companies. The three core people involved in the case were criminally sentenced in the Hebei Court. The three main persons involved in the case were sentenced to 6 to 11 years in prison and fined 50,000 to 80,000 yuan respectively for contract fraud.

Nowadays, people no longer deposit their currency holdings in the bank to increase interest, but more to invest. But in the process of investing, we must be vigilant, the common Ponzi scheme is constantly changing, it will be packaged with a beautiful appearance, but it is a wolf in sheep's clothing after all.

Therefore, when we choose to invest, we should polish your eyes, and at the same time evaluate the value of the enterprise or project you invest in to see whether it has the ability as described, whether it is true and reliable, and whether it is exaggerated.

Ponzi schemes, old and new scams, so it is necessary to have extraordinary wisdom in the investment process in order not to be deceived.