A bigger risk than GameStop? Failing Ponzi schemes ring alarm bells for Wall Street
We’re sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
Dismiss
By Paul Sullivan
Normal text size
Advertisement
The GameStop stock saga — with its element of David versus Goliath, not to mention its head-turning price gains followed by stomach-churning drops — may have been all the talk of Wall Street in the last couple of weeks.
But that is just a sideshow.
Ponzi schemes are collapsing while financial markets are soaring, concerning legal and market experts.
Credit:AP
A bigger issue for investors may well be the increasing number of Ponzi schemes, which use money from new investors to pay earlier investors until the fraud falls apart. Many of the latest fraudsters have been preying on people who feel they lost out on the big stock market gains of last few years. The schemes have failed because they did not have the sophisticated apparatus of two of the biggest in the last decade — the multibillion-dollar ones perpetrated by Bernie Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.