yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How A Ponzi Scheme Works


less than 1m read
·Nov 8, 2024

So you may have heard about Ponzi schemes in the news. Everybody knows they're illegal, but you might not understand how they work. So Ben is here to show us.

To start off, Ben gets a few people to invest their money with him. At the end of the year, he gives those clients amazing returns that beat every other investor in the market. Needless to say, the investors are thrilled. In fact, they're so ecstatic about all the money they're making that they tell all their friends and family about it too, who tell their friends, who tell their friends.

In the stock market, most investors make money some years and lose money others. But Ben's Ponzi scheme, yeah, it never loses money. In fact, it always beats the market by a huge margin.

But the returns he pays to these people aren't from actual profits. He just takes the money these new guys invest and gives it to these guys. But as soon as you can't get enough new money from this group to pay these people, then the whole pyramid starts to crumble because they're not getting paid anymore.

Ben, and these guys who invested first, made a killing, but these folks lost all their money. So the next time a guy like Ben tries to get you to invest in something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Just ask Ben. Wahoo!

More Articles

View All
Homeroom with Sal & Dave Travis - Wednesday, September 9
Hi, everyone! Sal here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our “Homeroom Live Stream.” I’m out here in California where the sky is looking very ominous. It looks like, yeah, you can’t—it’s bizarre. I’ve never quite seen this. For those of y’all who don’t know, …
Discovering Homo Naledi: Journey to Find a Human Ancestor, Part 1 | Nat Geo Live
Lee: I’d come to South Africa. I’d launched myself into exploration. And out I went looking to combine these technologies: satellite imagery and handheld GPS. I started mapping sites. I saw that cave sites formed in linear lines. I saw fossil sites cluste…
Daily Live Homeroom With Sal: Wednesday, March 25
Hi everyone! Sal Khan here for our daily live stream. Just as a reminder of what this is for some of y’all who might be new: as the school closures have kind of rolled out around not just the country but the world, we realized that there’s a lot of demand…
Enchanted Soudah: Traditions in the Clouds | Saudi Arabia | National Geographic
Dancing flower men. An ancient stone village. Secrets hidden in Saudi Arabia’s mountains might surprise you. I’m a photojournalist, and ever since I heard about the Rijal [Altib], the flower men of Rijal Almaa, I’ve wanted to come to Soudah Peaks. In the…
What Is Life? Is Death Real?
Life is fundamentally different from dead stuff—or is it? Physicist Erwin Schrödinger defined life this way: Living things avoid decay into disorder and equilibrium. What does this mean? Let’s pretend that your download folder is the universe. It started…
Stock Buyback Scams
Some finance junkies are thinking, and what about stock buybacks? Public companies have returned hundreds of billions of dollars to investors through buybacks. The critical word that is missing from their vocabulary and calculation is dilution: the additi…