Thousands of people living in Zimbabwe, among them civil servants, vendors and more, are said to have lost thousands of dollars to fraudulent online pyramid scheme MMM Global Zimbabwe after the system collapsed recently. The social financial network, which relied
on an accelerating number of new members to pay off the old, abruptly terminated its services without any prior notice last week leaving participants stranded.
There has also been an MMM crash in South Africa.
What it simply means is that the number of people in need of help has outnumbered the number of people joining. Right now we have nowhere to get our money which we invested.”So when did MMM start in Zimbabwe?Can't really answer that,but what i can tell you is MMM stands for Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox and takes its name from its founder, Sergei Panteleevich Mavrodi of Russia. He founded MMM in 1989 and the scheme was declared bankrupt three years later leading to the disappearance of Mavrodi until his arrest in 2003. While some people who were skeptical about the scheme started with small amounts, it is believed some poured in thousands of dollars anticipating higher returns. The RBZ said the schemes were fraudulent as existing investors were ‘paid money not from genuine market investment of their funds, but from contributions made by new investors, until a point when the scheme can no longer attract new investors.”
Currently, the scheme is in Nigeria and it is called MMM – Federal Republic of Nigeria. Lots of Nigerians are on the scheme and the scheme actually works (just like how it was working well at first in Zimbabwe). MMM Nigeria, is a Ponzi scheme that originated in Russia that has now set up in Nigeria.
I really fear for the Nigeria MMM cos Nigerians love money too much.If info is not quickly passed around and hereby protecting the people,i forsee lots of financial disasters!
Wikipedia says the company was involved in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in the 1990s. It was estimated that thousands of people lost up to $10 billion dollars. Well, a lot of people think the scheme is legit and not a scam but the history of the company says the opposite. Only time will tell.
But the bottom line is that as long as their is greed in this world,people will keep falling for scams like the MMM Zimbabwe crash.