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Charles Ponzi was an Italian swindler and con artist in the U.S. and Canada. His aliases include Charles Ponci, Carlo, and Charles P. Bianchi. Born and raised in Italy, he became known in the early 1920s as a swindler in North America for his money-making scheme. He promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the United States as a form of arbitrage. In reality, Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors. While this type of fraudulent investment scheme was not originally invented by Ponzi, it became so identified with him that it now is referred to as a "Ponzi scheme". His scheme ran for over a year before it collapsed, costing his "investors" $20 million.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. The scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from product sales or other means, and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as new investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to own.
Vijay Singh, CF, nicknamed "The Big Fijian", is an Indo-Fijian professional golfer. He has won 34 events on the PGA Tour, including three major championships: one Masters title (2000) and two PGA Championships. He was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2006.
This article summarizes the highlights of professional and amateur golf in the year 2004.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, founded in 1962, is a pediatric treatment and research facility focused on children's catastrophic diseases, particularly leukemia and other cancers. The hospital costs about $2.8 million a day to run, and there is no cost to the patient to be treated. It is located in Memphis, Tennessee, and is a nonprofit medical corporation designated as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization by the Internal Revenue Service.
The WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational is a professional golf tournament hosted at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee from 2019 onwards, and is one of the four annual World Golf Championships.
Notah Ryan Begay III is an American professional golfer. He is the only full-blood Native American golfer on the PGA Tour. Since 2013, Begay has served as an analyst with the Golf Channel and NBC Sports.
The Foundation for New Era Philanthropy was a notorious Ponzi scheme that operated from 1989 until its collapse in 1995 after having raised over $500 million from 1100 donors and embezzling $135 million of this. Most of the money was stolen from Christian religious organizations and charities in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. The scheme was publicly discovered by an accounting teacher at a college in Michigan called Albert Meyer and the auditing firm Coopers & Lybrand working with its client, a local religious college in Los Angeles who suffered no loss in its participation.
Robert Allen Stanford, known primarily by his middle name, is an American convicted financial fraudster and former financier who was the sponsor of professional sports. He is currently serving a 110-year federal prison sentence, having been convicted in 2012 of charges that his investment company was a massive Ponzi scheme and fraud.
This article summarizes the highlights of professional and amateur golf in the year 2008.
Thomas Joseph Petters is an American businessman and the chairman and CEO of Petters Group Worldwide who was convicted of massive business fraud in 2009 and is now imprisoned at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth. Amid mounting criminal investigations, Petters resigned as his company's CEO on September 29, 2008. He was convicted of numerous federal crimes for operating Petters Group Worldwide as a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme and received a 50-year federal sentence.
Nicholas Cosmo is an American former businessman and white-collar criminal. He was arrested January 26, 2009 on charges of an estimated $370–413 million Ponzi scheme. Cosmo conducted the scheme using his company Agape World Inc. in Hauppauge, New York, which claimed to make its profits via commercial bridge lending. Authorities arrested him in Hicksville, New York.
The Stanford Financial Group was a privately held international group of financial services companies controlled by Allen Stanford, until it was seized by United States (U.S.) authorities in early 2009. Headquartered in the Galleria Tower II in Uptown Houston, Texas, it had 50 offices in several countries, mainly in the Americas, included the Stanford International Bank, and said it managed US$8.5 billion of assets for more than 30,000 clients in 136 countries on six continents. On February 17, 2009, U.S. Federal agents placed the company into receivership due to charges of fraud. Ten days later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission amended its complaint to accuse Stanford of turning the company into a "massive Ponzi scheme".
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former NASDAQ Chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Laura Pendergest-Holt is a convicted Ponzi scheme artist, financier, and former Chief Investment Officer of Stanford Financial Group, who was charged with a civil charge of fraud on February 17, 2009. On May 12, 2009, Pendergest-Holt was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of a criminal complaint of obstructing a fraud investigation and conspiracy to obstruct justice. In early 2009, Stanford Financial became the subject of several fraud investigations, and on February 17, 2009, Pendergest-Holt was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud and multiple violations of U.S. securities laws for alleged "massive ongoing fraud" involving $8 billion in certificates of deposits. The FBI raided three of Stanford's offices in Houston, Memphis, and Tupelo, Mississippi. On February 27, 2009, the SEC amended its complaint to describe the alleged fraud as a "massive Ponzi scheme". On June 21, 2012, she pleaded guilty to obstructing a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Stanford International Bank, the Antiguan offshore bank owned by Robert Allen Stanford. On September 13, 2012, Holt was sentenced to three years in prison, followed by three years of supervised probation. She was released on April 23, 2015.
The FedEx St. Jude Classic was a professional golf tournament held in Memphis, Tennessee as a regular event on the PGA Tour. The tournament was held annually from 1958 through 2018, and was played in June at TPC Southwind.
PGA Tour Champions is a men's professional senior golf tour, administered as a branch of the PGA Tour.
The Saradha Group financial scandal was a major financial scam and alleged political scandal caused by the collapse of a Ponzi scheme run by Saradha Group, a consortium of over 200 private companies that was believed to be running collective investment schemes popularly but incorrectly referred to as chit funds in Eastern India.
Ezubao was a peer-to-peer lending scheme based in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui. It was set up as an online scheme in July 2014, attracted funds of about 50 billion yuan from 900,000 investors, and ceased to trade in December 2015. On 1 February 2016, the scheme was closed down and 21 involved people were arrested. Zhang Min, the president of the parent company, Yucheng Global, told investigators that the company operated as a Ponzi scheme.
References
- ↑ Driver, Anna (27 February 2009). "U.S. charges Stanford with massive Ponzi scheme". Reuters . Thomson Reuters . Retrieved 28 February 2009.