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
Curvature formula, part 4
So, we’ve been talking about curvature, and this means, uh, you’ve got some sort of parametric curve that you might think of as parameterized by a vector-valued function s of t. Curvature is supposed to measure just how much this curve actually curves. So…
Helium 101 | National Geographic
[Narrator] Most people know helium as the lighter than air gas that fills our party balloons. But more importantly, it’s an irreplaceable element for science and industry. Helium was discovered in 1868 during a solar eclipse. Astronomers observed a yellow…
What is Déjà vu?
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And today we’re going to discuss déjà vu. What is it, and why does it occur? You know, those moments where the current situation feels like it’s happened before? You’re certain it has, but you don’t know when, or how it became s…
Baker v. Carr | Interactions among branches of government | US government and civics | Khan Academy
[Kim] Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy. Today we’re learning more about Baker versus Carr, a landmark Supreme Court case decided in 1962. Baker versus Carr grappled with an incredibly important issue: whether one person’s vote is equal to another person’…
15 Ways to Get Out of Any Situation
Do you feel trapped in a situation you don’t want to be in? Maybe you feel like you’re stagnating in life. Maybe you’re living paycheck to paycheck. Maybe you’re unhappy with your weight. Whatever your situation is, when you’re stuck in a rut, it can feel…
Taxing Unrealized Values Can Destroy Billionaires
Most people don’t realize that this can actually make Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos go broke and send their stocks crashing. The reason is because 48 trillion dollars of stock value equals zero dollars in real money, and the IRS only takes real money. Bi…