Ponzi scheme

English

Etymology

Named after con artist Charles Ponzi (1882–1949), who famously conducted such form of fraud in North America in the 1920s.

Noun

Ponzi scheme (plural Ponzi schemes)

  1. A fraudulent scheme where earlier investors are paid with the money taken from new investors, giving the impression that the scheme is a viable investment.
    Synonym: Ponzi scam
    Coordinate term: pyramid scheme
    • 2016, Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, page 115:
      After the presidency, Grant invested almost every penny he had to create a financial brokerage house with a controversial investor named Ferdinand Ward. Ward, a Bernie Madoff of his day, turned it into a Ponzi scheme, and publicly bankrupted Grant.
    • 2021 April 14, Diana B. Henriques, “Bernard Madoff, Architect of Largest Ponzi Scheme in History, Is Dead at 82”, in The New York Times‎[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 25 December 2025:
      Bernard L. Madoff, the one-time senior statesman of Wall Street who in 2008 became the human face of an era of financial misdeeds and missteps for running the largest and possibly most devastating Ponzi scheme in financial history, died on Wednesday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C. He was 82.
    • 2021 May 20, Paul Krugman, “Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin”, in The New York Times‎[2], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 17 November 2025:
      Now, a long-running Ponzi scheme requires a narrative — and the narrative is where crypto really excels.

Translations

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