Yeah, pyramid schemes are quite unwieldy, especially this one:
Pennies on the dollar, right? A Ponzi scheme can’t pay back 100%. Some of the money- usually most of it- gets spent.
I’m in the wrong business.
I hate it when white collar criminals get away with things but it seems like the boingboing summary leaves out a few important facts:
But while Boskovich was padding his take, he didn’t realize the scam’s mastermind was running a full-scale Ponzi scheme, living large in Minnesota on clients’ cash instead of investing in printing jobs, authorities said.
and
The corresponding criminal case ran into serious roadblocks from victims who worried they wouldn’t be able to recoup their losses if they helped with felony prosecution, Labreche said.
“Unfortunately, there was a complete lack of cooperation from victims,” he said.
That and long delays that led to issues with the statute of limitations helped persuade prosecutors to reach a deal with Boskovich.
Those two things make this case seem a lot more complicated.
Good point. I was about to call bull on the “living large in Minnesota” part, too…
I think Janet Jackson lives there too, doesn’t she?
Yeah. It’s hard to know how a pyramid scammer is going to get the money to pay back his victims, especially if he’s not the top guy in the chain, except by scamming more people.
But it’s not surprising that some of the victims didn’t want to talk, because either they had already scammed other people into buying in, or else they didn’t want to be revealed as fools, or often some of the investors will have “borrowed” money to invest in this great “sure thing”, and don’t have the money to pay it back.
My church once got ripped of by a “building contractor” who was really in the business of doing shoddy construction, showing it off to more victims, and skipping town. (At least we found out before he built our building.) We decided not to try to get money back from him, because it would have been on a “pay over a few years” plan, and he’d just be getting it by scamming more people.
I was disappointed to discover that Laguna Niguel is not in Florida.
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