What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial on this channel, we cover everything related to stocks and investing in today's video we're going to go over one of the most insane and sophisticated ponzi schemes the world has ever seen that is still operating today. There have been many multi-billion dollar ponzi schemes that have operated for decades without being exposed, but eventually they crumble under their own weight and their operations are shut down. The ponzi scheme we're covering in this video, is different. It's been operating for 30 years and has been exposed as a fraud many times yet every time it gets shut down, it reappears with a slightly different form.

We're talking about the triple n ponzi scheme before we get into the video we'd like to thank our channel members, members get access to our backlog of videos in the community tab of our youtube page. We always keep at least five videos in the backlog. Members also get to vote on some of our video topics. In the 1990s, the soviet union had just collapsed and russia was transitioning from communism to capitalism.

One young man by the name of sergey morodi, wanted to take advantage of the opportunities of the new economy. With the help of two friends, he established a computer importing business called the triple m corporation after a couple years. This business failed and sergi had to think of a new direction for triple m. He decided to enter the investment services industry at the time russia was privatizing, its state-owned enterprises and sold privatization vouchers to the public at cheap prices, triple m created companies that would aggregate money from investors and buy these privatization vouchers for huge profits.

He sold shares in this new company to investors, initially promising 3 000 annual returns. They spent aggressively on advertising running tv commercials showing how a triple m investor made enough money to buy his wife new boots, a new fur coat and a new car in just a few months. Eventually, they increased the promise returns to 30 thousand percent per year, while 30 000 returns might sound absurd to you or me, russia had only recently turned into a capitalist country. People didn't know much about stocks or investing and no benchmark to judge what should be reasonable by 1994.

The scheme was a huge success. Sergey was raking in millions of dollars per day from millions of individual investors. The extent of this camp had gotten so bad that the russian president, boris yeltsin, took notice and ordered the ministry of finance to crack down on the unregistered security offerings in false advertising. They launched an investigation into triple m and quickly found out that it was a ponzi scheme.

They were not making any of the investments that they said they were and were instead using money from later investors to pay out previous investors after they shut the operation down. There are massive crowds outside their headquarters, trying to get their money back, but there was no money to give back and the vast majority of investors lost everything, despite the overwhelming evidence against him. Sergi maintained that triple m was a legit company and the government was just cracking down on him because they were jealous of his success to avoid prosecution. He ran for a seat in the russian parliament.

Surprisingly enough, victims of his ponzi scheme believed in him to get him elected in 1994. As a member of parliament, sergey had immunity from criminal charges brought against him, but this gimmick only had short-lived success. Almost immediately after his election, the parliament voted to strip him of his immunity. He got enough signatures to run for president, which should also give him immunity, but this also failed when election authorities found out that most of his signatures were forged.

He was officially charged with fraud in 1998, but he hid in moscow for five years before the authorities. Eventually found him in 2003, he was eventually found and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. This is an incredibly light prison sentence for a man who scammed millions of people out of hundreds of millions of dollars after he was released. He almost immediately started.

Another ponzi scheme called triple m global. Triple m global was even more blatant than his original ponzi scheme. They promised 100 returns per month, but didn't claim to have any business operations or investments. They just said your money will grow and you can withdraw when more people enter the scheme.

You can pay real money to your platform and receive a virtual currency called navro. Your mavro will grow every week at a promise rate of 30 to 100. When you want to withdraw your mavrow, the money will come from people who enter the scheme. After you, a system like this is called a transparent ponzi scheme.

They don't even claim to have legitimate operations. People who enter into it either have to be incredibly unsophisticated or believe that they can get in on the ground floor and cash out before it falls apart. Sergi knew that poor countries would make the easiest targets for a scam, because people often lack financial education and had deep distrust of the government and law enforcement. To this end, he set his sights on africa, setting up triple m branches in south africa, ia, zimbabwe, kenya and ghana.

They also entered southeast asian countries, including the philippines and south american countries, including brazil, triple m lures, its victims with its supposed ideology of empowering the people financially, they preach a marxist ideology, saying that the current banking system and financial overlords enjoy incredible wealth, while the workers Live in poverty, they claim that the triple m system is a non-profit charity which is breaking down the old financial system and replacing it with a fair system for peer-to-peer financial help. They use aggressive advertising showing how a 200 investment would grow to four thousand dollars in one year, based on a 30 monthly growth rate. When bitcoin became popular, they started associating this game with cryptocurrencies to capitalize off the hype. They would offer people 50 monthly returns if they made their investment in bitcoin.

Instead of traditional currency, they even made their own cryptocurrency called navro to facilitate transactions into the scam. In addition to being a ponzi scheme, triple m global is also a pyramid scheme. People are awarded more mavros if they advertise the scam to new people online and recruit new members. They use this method to get testimonials from members talking about how much money they make with the scheme and how good it is.

The biggest single victim of triple n global is ia. They entered the african country in 2015, offering their usual gimmick of 30 returns per month. Nigeria was the perfect target for a ponzi scheme, as the government, corruption is rampant and the people have little trust in established authorities. This makes them more susceptible to scammers, promising a fairer financial system.

They targeted the most vulnerable parts of the population, including the unemployed and the elderly. They even got church leaders involved in the scam, getting them to promote triple m to their congregations. It was incredibly successful and within the first year they raised tens of millions of dollars from 2.4 million victims. The problem with ponzi schemes is that they require new participants to pay the principal and interest to older participants because triple m offered 30 monthly returns the size of their liabilities increased exponentially and they quickly ran out of new people to scam within one year.

The original launch triple m ia froze all accounts, so people couldn't take their money out. They refused to admit that it was a scam and blamed the freeze on negative attention from the government and media. Millions of people lost everything and the government set up a special hotline to prevent people from committing suicide. Nigeria is rampant with ponzi schemes and other frauds, given how many there are.

The government doesn't have the resources to investigate every single one thoroughly, so the perpetrators behind triple m ia were never caught in 2017. They reopened the scam accepting new money. They claimed that they would give victims of the old scan back all their money if they invested new money to buy new mavros. It was obvious that they were just using the new money that they raised to pay off.

The old investors, and the new investors would be left holding the bag. But ia was in a deep recession at the time, and people were desperate to make money in any way they could so they'd collect together what little money they had in deposit into triple m again, the scheme collapsed within less than a year and investors lost another 60 million dollars many people lost their life savings and were financially ruined over the years. Triple m opened subsidiaries in over 100 countries, mostly poor countries with permitted financial regulations. They scan people in brazil, the philippines, indonesia and many countries in africa in 2018.

The mastermind behind triple m sergey mavrodi died of heart problems at the age of 62 in a moscow hospital. While he did spend four years in prison for the original triple m scam in russia, he was shockingly never charged with the triple m global scams. They orchestrated after that, it's unclear how much money that sergey personally made from the scams that investors across the world lost hundreds of millions of dollars from much of this money lined the pockets of the scheme's many international, affiliates and promoters triple m is still operating today. In many countries across the world with sergi now dead, each local branch operates independently.

They claim to have 138 million members, but this number is impossible to verify the decentralized nature makes it almost impossible to completely eradicate them. Possibly, the reason that triple m has been so successful is how blatant it is. They don't claim to have any real investment and the only way that they can pay out their early. Investors is if they can get enough new investors to sign on most people know that it's a scam, but they think that they can profit from it.

If they can just get in early and cash out before it collapses, of course, this rarely happens and almost all the money is taken by the promoters who are running the scam, alright, guys that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about triple m? Why do you think so many people fall for such an obvious scam? Let us know in the comments section below as always. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one wall, street millennial, signing out.