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| MMM Nigeria |
“MMM Pays investors 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”.
“What it simply means is that the number of people in need of help has outnumbered the number of people joining. The Scheme Crashes. Right now we have nowhere to get our money which we invested.”
Barely 24 hours after MMM founder, Sergey Mavrodi wrote an open letter to Nigerian Authorities, criticising the later’s constant attacks on the ponzi scheme, BreezeReporters can authoritatively reports that MMM Nigeria has crashed.
The administrators of the scheme, early Tuesday, announced freezing of participants’ monies for one month.
In a letter posted on the scheme’s website, MMM said; “As usual, in the New Year season, the System is experiencing heavy workload.
Read how it happened
The founder of the MMM financial pyramid scheme Sergey Mavrodi, holding a copy of his banned book ‘Temptation’ in Moscow in May 2008. Mavrodi’s schemes stole life savings from more than a million Russians in the early 1990s AFP/Getty
Thousands of investors are feared to have lost their money after a pyramid scheme run by a convicted Russian fraudster crashed, somewhat predictably, in Zimbabwe.
MMM Global has, swept across Africa, with branches promising returns on investment of 30 per cent a month in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and some east African states.
MMM Global has, swept across Africa, with branches promising returns on investment of 30 per cent a month in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and some east African states.
It is masterminded by the former Russian politician Sergey Mavrodi, who went on the run when the original MMM – standing for Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox – collapsed in the late 1990s, losing investors an estimated $100m.
On its website, MMM Global unashamedly advertises itself as a scheme whereby new members “assist” older members by paying a fee to join. Older members are allowed to withdraw money after a certain period of time, and receive bonuses for encouraging others to sign up.
Mavrodi himself is reported to have gone into hiding after a separate entity designed to reward investors with the cryptocurrency bitcoin – dubbed the “Republic of Bitcoin” – folded in April this year.
And since then, a criminal investigation has been launched into MMM Global’s branch in South Africa, after a probe by the National Consumer Commission “found something” to suggest the scheme was acting illegally.
With Zimbabwe’s traditional financial institutions in jeopardy and the country gripped by an economic crisis, thousands turned to MMM Global as an investment that was avowedly independent of government control.
That’s despite a warning from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe that the scheme was fraudulent. RBZ warned members of the public that 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”.
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