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
How I Got Arrested Working to Save Elephants | National Geographic
Imagine this: I’m in Tanzania and I am about to enter the airport in Dar es Salaam. I have a large suitcase with elephant tusks inside. I’m trying to put all the bags in together to try to mask, and the bags go through. Then he says the worst thing an air…
Physics Nobel Prize 2011 - Brian Schmidt
[Applause] There are few things in the world that seem more constant than the stars in the night sky. If you look up at the Milky Way, you will see the same thing that people have looked at for thousands and thousands of years. But as Professor Schmidt fo…
Donald Trump Accuses President Biden Of Stopping Peace Deal Between Russia And Ukraine
Things P.O. on Ukraine and Iran—the two negotiations you’ll be heading into. Um, on Ukraine, you said just before, it’s a lot more complicated now, much more complicated. Do you believe it is because it would have never started, right? But it has started…
Descendents of Cahokia | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Tucked away in St. Louis, Missouri, in a southern section of the city, just between the Mississippi River and Interstate 55, there’s a historic landmark, but you’d never know it. It’s on a road that’s easy to miss and, frankly, pretty beat up. There’s not…
Watch This If You Keep Making Plans but Never Follow Through
I’m a pro procrastinator, and the only time I get motivated is the night before the deadline. When I tell this to people, oftentimes I get recommended to use a planner. Everyone recommends writing things down that I need to do, putting them in an order, b…
Biases in algorithms | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy
Algorithms increasingly control many areas of our everyday lives, from loan applications to dating apps to hospital waiting lists. As responsible consumers and now creators of algorithms, we need to think critically about how the success of an algorithm g…