Over a century ago, Charles Ponzi gained infamy with a return-postage-coupon scheme in which he promised quick riches to investors — instead using money from new investors to provide supposed returns to earlier ones.
The Boston immigrant raked in about $20 million in less than a year in 1920, an amount worth nearly $325 million today. So notable was the scam that numerous frauds with the same basic structure in the generations since bear Ponzi’s name.
ThinkAdvisor looked at major financial misdeeds from the past century, and while Ponzi’s own scheme is a bit too old to qualify, his name figured into many more recent frauds. We focus here on schemes led by individuals, so large corporate accounting accounting scandals like the Enron meltdown are omitted.
See the accompanying gallery for 10 of the worst financial frauds of the past 100 years and the players who led them.
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