Charles Ponzi's scheme (plus a new scam)

Charles Ponzi was down on his luck. In 1919, the Italian immigrant had spent a decade and a half in the U. S. He was looking for a way to get rich and tried his hand at everything — including bookkeeping, sign painting, grocery clerk, dishwasher, and librarian. He caught a lucky break in August, when he received a letter from Europe. In the envelope was an International Reply Coupon, a clever way to prepay for international postage. Ponzi realized he might be able to use these coupons to make his fortune. All he needed was investors. What happened next made him a household name. This is the story of the man behind the eponymous Ponzi scheme — a tale of financial fraud that lives up to its linguistic legacy. (Note: The original version of this episode ran in 2023 https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1150332566/charles-ponzi-financial-scam.) Read Planet Money: • Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD • Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUB • Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow Planet Money: • Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuws • TikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrq • YouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3C • Facebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS Listen to more Planet Money: • Our short, daily podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money • Over 1,000 episodes in our archive on the NPR App https://app.npr.org/aggregation/510289 Merch: • NPR Shop https://shopnpr.org/search?q=planet+money&options%5Bprefix%5D=last • The Planet Money game, Sell Me A Sasquatch https://shopnpr.org/products/planet-moneys-sell-me-a-sasquatch-board-game?_pos=1&_sid=c2996cc29&_ss=r Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. This episode was produced by James Sneed. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez, mastered by Natasha Branch, and edited by Jess Jiang. It's based on the book Ponzi's Scheme, by Mitchell Zuckoff. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:17Speaker 01

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Most of us in this world are destined to be forgotten. I know, it's sad, but it's true. A lucky few will land in the history books. Fewer still might have our names put on something, a roadside, a stadium, maybe even get a statue or a plaque. Probably the least likely scenario is to become so famous, or so infamous, that our names will live on in language. Gerrymander, the word named after Elbridge Gerry, 19th century governor of Massachusetts and early pioneer of the gerrymander. Saxophone, named after its inventor, Adolphe Sax.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  And then there's the Ponzi, the Ponzi scheme, named after one Charles Ponzi.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  A Ponzi scheme is an investment opportunity that's more of a con. The way it works is you have to use or steal money from newer investors to pay back the earlier ones. They happen all the time these days. In fact, just recently, Travis Kelsey, husband to Taylor Swift, was named by prosecutors as a victim in a $35 million Ponzi scheme. But I'm just going to come out and say it. Most of the time, these modern day Ponzi's, they're amateur hour compared to the one pulled off by Charles Ponzi. An Italian immigrant living in Boston, who pulled off his scheme for a brief seven months, about 100 years ago. He wasn't the first, he wouldn't be the biggest.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  But after you hear his story, you'll get it. You'll get why he's allowed to live on forever in infamy. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain. Today on the show, in honor of the newlyweds, Taylor and Travis, one of my favorite shows from the vault, the story of how Charles Ponzi stole millions of dollars and defrauded tens of thousands of people. It's way wilder than you think. It involves a system of speculating on worldwide currencies thanks to a loophole in the global mail system, a daring plan to rob a bank, and a very generous pound of flesh. And you're going to want to stick around to the end because there is some news. Apparently scammers have been impersonating us

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  at Planet Money and other podcasters, too. We're going to share what we know and how to avoid falling for their traps.

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• 4:05Speaker 02

  A Ponzi, a word so familiar that just rolls off the tongue. A shorthand for robbing Peter to pay Paul. And while his name has become infamous, the story of Charles Ponzi was not that well-known. That is, until journalist and author Mitch Zuckoff just kind of stumbled upon it.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  I was a banking reporter for a while at the Boston Globe. And I was at a press conference, and the state treasurer just offhandedly said, you know, banks haven't failed like this in Boston since Ponzi's day. And I did a comic double take of huh? And he said, yeah, you knew Ponzi was based here in Boston. And I said, yeah, sure, I knew that. I'm a banking reporter. Of course I knew that, you know, I had no idea.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Mitch kind of became obsessed with Ponzi and wrote a book about him. It's called Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend. To write the book, Mitch went to Italy and found Ponzi's birth records. He read thousands of court documents. He found records of every single victim. And he read Ponzi's private letters. He also looked through a bunch of photos. There aren't many from when Ponzi's young, but in one, he's dressed in this three-piece suit with a tie. He has a pretty well-kept mustache, perfectly combed hair, and these big, thick eyebrows.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  And it's also worth mentioning that Ponzi is diminutive. You know, he's a guy 5'2". I think he lied about being 5'3", you know?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Classic, yes.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  And so if Ponzi was going to make it, he understood he had to do it with his head.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Uh huh, just because he's a little guy.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  He's a little guy, yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Maybe it was the height, maybe it was something else. But throughout his life, Ponzi was always looking for the thing that was going to make him rich. He was the type to take big swings, big risks, that often involved leaps of faith. And in 1903, he did what many young Italians in search of riches were doing back then. He got on a boat to America. For the greater part of the next two decades, Ponzi tried to make his fortune. This guy had more jobs and a more of a varied resume than anybody I've ever heard of. Can you just list off some of the jobs?

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. He worked in a bank. He was a translator. He was a mining camp nurse. He was a road roller. He was a sign painter, you know, on and on.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Grocery clerk, factory hand, dishwasher, waiter, librarian.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  He was, you know, he was an itinerant immigrant, you know, rolling up and down the East Coast of the United States, looking for work and trying to find his place.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  And Ponzi's big swings, high-risk, figure-out-the-details-later attitude? It wasn't just about getting rich. This one time, Mitch says, Ponzi was working at a mining camp in Appalachia when there was a terrible accident at a hospital. A nurse named Pearl was burned when a gas stove burst.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  He's sitting down for a beer with this doctor he knows at the mining camp. And he asks, you know, how's Pearl? And the doctor tells him, you know, it's pretty desperate. Gangrene is setting in. And so Ponzi says, how can you help her? And he says, maybe a skin graft. And, you know, he wanted to try it, but he couldn't find anyone who'd give up their skin to save this woman they didn't know at all. And Ponzi didn't really know her either. But in the moment, Ponzi said, how much do you need? How much skin do you need? And he said, well, probably 40 or 50 square inches. Ponzi said, you got them. I'll give you all the skin you need.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Ponzi was on an operating table that evening. Doctors cut off 72 square inches of skin from his thighs. Later, he gave another 50 inches from his back. It was a classic Ponzi big swing, and it was risky. He ended up spending months in the hospital. But it paid off. The nurse, Pearl, she lived. It's an incredible story, and it doesn't fit the picture I have of Ponzi.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  I love that. I thought I was going to write about a guy who was just a schemer, who was just a snake. And the deeper I went, the more I felt sort of the stirrings of sympathy, the stirrings of empathy. And, you know, what he did was wrong. And what, you know, and I'm not confused by that. But I kind of understood the motivation of a guy who couldn't stop, as he put it, you know, the snowball, once it started rolling downhill, and not get rolled over by it.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  This next chapter of Ponzi's story is all about that snowball. How he got the idea that started it rolling, and how he turned this big idea into a big scam that was hard to stop. And as his story unfolds, you're going to hear some obvious red flags, in part because I'm going to point them out. I'm going to give the red flags these little rhymes. Here it goes. By 1919, Ponzi had spent 15 years trying to make it in the US. He was living in Boston. He'd gotten married. He'd rented an office downtown, right next to City Hall. And then, one day in August, he's going through the mail.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  He opens a letter, and out flutters this little, it almost looks like a dollar bill, but it's kind of squared. And it's an international reply coupon.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  An international reply coupon. What's that?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  An international reply coupon is basically, it's a coupon that enables you to buy a stamp in another country.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  It's actually a pretty clever solution to a problem. If you want to send a letter to, say, your Nona in Naples, and you want to make it easier for her to respond with news from the motherland, what are you going to do? You can't send her US stamps. You can't send her nickels. You can't send her an Italian lira, because you're paid in dollars. Instead, you can send her an international reply coupon, which is like a voucher that you can buy at your local US post office, and she can redeem for an Italian stamp at her local Italian post office. It's an easy way to prepay for a reply. And what Ponzi realized, sitting right there in his office, was that these international reply coupons were a magical way to make money through arbitrage.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  That is, taking advantage of price differences to make an easy profit.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  He had what can only be described as a eureka moment. And he started doing sort of back-of-the-envelope calculations.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  See, this was just after the Great War and the Great Influenza. And the economies of Europe were in a bad place. Many of their currencies had been devalued. But the organization that set the going rate for these international reply coupons had not adjusted for inflation how much it costs to buy the coupons in different countries. And that meant essentially, he could buy these coupons on sale.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  In Europe.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Yes. So, a dollar could buy 20 of these coupons for $0.05 each in the United States. But because the value of the lira had been so devastated by the war.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  The Italian lira, yes.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  The Italian lira, you could buy more than three times as many of those in Italy.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  For the equivalent of a US dollar.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Correct. And so, he realized that after expenses, he could make $2.30 for every dollar's worth of coupons he bought in Italy.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Amazing profits. Perfect arbitrage opportunity.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Sign me up. Yes, I want in. And, and, and, and it's legal.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  There are a few minor details that Ponzi can't quite figure out yet. For instance, how to sell these coupons or stamps for cash in the US. But he figures he can sell them in bulk to companies that send a lot of mail. There is also the transport problem at scale. These might be kind of heavy, but he thinks, you know what? It's a good idea. I'll figure out the details later. Now is the time to take big swings. Now's the time to create a company.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  He goes right next door to City Hall, and he incorporates a business. And he calls it the Securities Exchange Company.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  The SEC. Why not? The Securities Exchange Commission won't be around for another decade and a half. Ponzi starts calling around the community to find people who will invest in his company. He tells them, if they give him cash now, he'll be able to make a profit by buying and selling these stamped coupons and share a bunch of that profit with them. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Ponzi's scheme turned into a scam, but you could argue that it was during these first few pitches. Because Ponzi was soliciting investments without figuring out those pesky details of how he would actually make money. Ponzi got around this by giving out just enough information for people to think it was a brilliant

• 13:11Speaker 02

  idea. But when they asked him questions like, hey, how exactly are you going to sell these stamped coupon things for cash? He didn't tell them, well, I haven't worked that out yet. He'd say, well, that's the proprietary sauce. I can't tell you that. So, here it is. Red flag number one. Is there a secret sauce? Maybe? Get lost. Do not invest in something where you don't understand all the details. Ponzi knew that people wouldn't care, though. He had them in a trance. And then, he'd lean in for the kill.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  He would say, you know, what are the banks paying you? If you put your money in a bank, they're going to give you what? 2%, maybe 3% a year? I can give you 50% interest in 90 days. In three months, your $100 will be $150. And, and that's the moment he knew that a calculation was happening in his client's head. Is this too good to be true, or is this too good to miss?

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Too good to be true or too good to miss?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  That's how I, I see all of this. How could he possibly give me 50% interest in 90 days? But if it's true, if this is possible, this is my ship coming in.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  This is red flag number two, and maybe the biggest red flag of all. Regular returns? You're going to get burned. Because the world isn't regular. Some years are good, some are bad. And investments that promise amazing returns every year, they're sketchy. But Ponzi's investors didn't pick up on this. People started pouring dozens, then thousands, at some point, a million dollars a week into Ponzi's postal coupon fake business. And Mitch says, to understand how Ponzi conned tens of thousands of people, you got to remember, he started his scheme in December of 1919, right on the cusp of the roaring 20s.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. I, I, I call it, this is the first roar of the 1920s. The idea that anything was possible had permeated not just the upper class, but to the newest immigrant. Yes, great riches were available here.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  So, people were primed for this? They had heard stories of getting rich quick, and so it seemed plausible?

• 15:28Speaker 04

  When, when I was doing the research on Ponzi, I spent a lot of time just reading what else was in the paper. And it was incredible. It was an entire genre of stories of sudden wealth that, you know, subconsciously or consciously, were playing into Ponzi's hands.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Like, space filler, or these were prominently featured?

• 15:51Speaker 04

  Prominently featured. Oh, front page stories, again and again, about, oh, marrying into wealth, you know? She rose from char girl to, you know, to, to, to, to ground dom, you know? And, and clearly, people, people wanted to read it.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  This might as well be red flag number three for an investment scheme. Beware the unrealistic expectations of quick wealth creation. Because this everyone's getting rich quick, why not me feeling, it's not just a 1920s phenomenon. It pops up whenever the economy is popping off. Whenever you see your neighbors getting rich, you get jealous and you want it. For Ponzi, business was booming. But remember, he never figured out those details. He never used investor money to buy postal coupons. Instead, when investors came back to his office looking to recoup their investment, he just paid them with the new money from new investors. This robbing Peter to pay Paul scheme is what's now known

• 16:54Speaker 02

  as a Ponzi. Sometimes regulators catch on to these schemes. But oftentimes, Ponzi's pop up in areas that are new or not regulated too much, which is red flag number four. If you're in the sticks, be careful with your picks. And postal policy was quite the hinterland. Regulators started poking around Ponzi's business, but they were kind of stumped. For instance, the first regulator that came around to ask questions was a state bureaucrat. He explained, he was in charge of making sure that loan sharks weren't charging too much interest. But Ponzi said, no, you have it backwards. I'm the one who has to pay out

• 17:35Speaker 02

  these big returns. I'm the one who's going to pay out 50%. The bureaucrat's like, oh, yeah, you're right. You're not a loan shark. You're the opposite. I guess, good day, sir?

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Basically, he goes back to his little cubby hole at the State House, and, you know, he sort of tells the police, well, just keep an eye on this guy. And he passes the buck, so to speak.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Did the Boston police keep their eye on him?

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Mostly to invest. Two thirds of the Boston Police Department were investing in Ponzi.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Two thirds of the Boston Police?

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  The police weren't going to do anything about it. Some of them even worked for Ponzi as salesmen. The regulators who probably visited Ponzi's operation the most were the postal inspectors. But try as they might, they could not figure out how Ponzi was making money on this stamped coupon arbitrage. Of course, that's because Ponzi hadn't figured that out either. So Ponzi's scheme got bigger and bigger. At its peak, in July of 1927, months after he started taking investments, Ponzi took in nearly $6.5 million from 20,000 investors in a single month. He had a nice mansion. He had a limo. He was on the front page of newspapers. After the break, how Ponzi's luck eventually ran out. Just like

• 18:56Speaker 02

  almost every Ponzi ever.

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• 20:13Speaker 02

  Remember, to keep up his stamp coupon scheme, Ponzi needed a constant stream of new investors. In fact, more investors than before to pay the earlier investors their profit, that 50%. Things started to turn when someone sued Ponzi. They said they were part owner of the company. Ponzi said, no, you just gave me a loan that I paid off a long time ago. But in the meantime, a court decided to freeze a bunch of Ponzi's bank accounts while they figured it all out. And this causes a mini panic. Mitch says thousands of investors showed up at Ponzi's office. It's like a scene of a bank run. They're all demanding their money back.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  People are excited and they're anxious and they're afraid. And people are pushing and shoving. And Ponzi wades into the crowd and incredibly, it calms them. And he survives the run. Things settle down. He pays off everyone who is seeking their return.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  But then state and federal regulators decide to take a second look at his business. Ponzi meets with them and tells them, you know what? I'm above board. I'm so above board, I'll let you check my books. You can even pick the auditor. This is a stall tactic and it's a problem. For one, Ponzi has been spending a lot on his new mansion, that limo, but also on stakes in legitimate businesses. He's even become part owner of multiple banks. And the second problem is he never figured out how to make money off the stamp thing. So he can't come up with the money he owes to all his investors. Ponzi is getting desperate. He knows that there is going to be this moment. The auditor will count up all his debts and Ponzi will have to show all the money

• 21:53Speaker 02

  that he actually has. This is the show me the money moment, when people could realize that he doesn't have all the money to pay his investors back. And Ponzi, ever the hustler, thinks up a plan that's both daring and pretty extraordinary.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  He's going to gather up all his bank books, all his cash, and go from his office. And he's going to make a stop before he goes over the auditor's office a few blocks away. He's going to stop at one of the banks he purchased. He has this idea that he is going to gain access to the vault of the Hanover Trust Bank. And he's going to, what should we say? Borrow a few million dollars from the vaults? Go over to the auditor, show all of this money and then return to the bank, take the money.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Temporarily rob his own bank.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  That's one way to put it. That is correct. I'm not saying it's a great plan, Nick, but it's a plan.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  The Massachusetts bank regulator, he senses something fishy is up. He starts asking the banks, hey, how much does Ponzi have in his accounts anyways? And the bankers tell him, well, not that much, actually. So the regulator arranges a stakeout.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  So he starts literally having guys watching the bank that Ponzi is withdrawing money from most aggressively. And they see that there are Ponzi guys coming to make withdrawals, to collect cash. They realize this is the moment. They figure there's no way there can be any cash left in that account because there were only a few thousand dollars left. And so they pounce and they declare him hopelessly insolvent and hopelessly overdrawn.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  And this is the end of the road for Ponzi's scheme. The auditor finally finishes his work. Ponzi owes about $7 million, probably more, but he only has about $4 million. The con can't go on any longer. He turns himself in. Did he do time?

• 23:55Speaker 04

  He did. He spent much of the 1920s in prison, behind bars, on various charges, all related to these few, few months of glory.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Charles Ponzi eventually ended up in Brazil. He died in the charity ward of a hospital with 75 bucks to his name, which went to his burial. But we all know his name, all because of a brief seven months where he was in the right place at the right frothy economic time with the right pitch. Why do you think it was that his scheme, his company, his Ponzi grew so fast?

• 24:32Speaker 04

  I think there's always a fear of missing out.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  FOMO, yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  FOMO, right. It's a real thing. FOMO is real. And so financial FOMO cuts even deeper. You're not just missing a party, your fear of missing out on the ship that was supposed to come in to change your life and to change your family's life. And so that is part of human nature, that Ponzi or people like him exploit.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  It's unclear when exactly Ponzi's name became a generic term for the con he pulled off. But one thing's for sure, it's going to stay that way because Ponzi's keep happening. It's human nature. FOMO is a new word, but it's a timeless emotion. So if you'll oblige me, I have one final red flag. Fear of missing out? Don't forget to doubt.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Maybe not.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  All right. So that was the origin of the Ponzi scam. But breaking news, 2026, there is a new scam out there involving podcasts of all things. Yikes, there nothing sacred in this world. Here's what you need to know. Scammers are impersonating our staff, folks from Planet Money and The Indicator. What we gather is that they're sending out messages to people, inviting them to be guests. Apparently, they're often reaching out to folks who are likely to have crypto holdings. And apparently, the fake profiles look quite convincing. They have fake URLs and social media accounts that they use to corroborate who they are. Okay. And then this is what we think happens next.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  The scammers invite the victims to a video call for the interview and then say they need to install some software on the victim's computer to record it. Then they find some way to distract the person. Can you go fix the lighting or go put on a sports coat, look more formal? And when the person returns to their computer, the scammer has pilfered their crypto holdings. So it kills me to say this because my job is way easier when people respond to me quickly. But please be vigilant. If you ever get a message from us or any other NPR journalist, double check the email address. Ours will always end with npr.org, not com.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  And this goes without saying, but we'll never ask for remote access to your computer. We'll never ask for money in exchange for an interview. And please do us a solid, please share this episode or information with anyone you think who might fall for this. And if you spot fake social media accounts, please report them to whatever social media platform you see them on and let us know at [email protected]. And please stay safe out there. As always, thank you to our Planet Money Plus supporters. They get sponsor free listening, they get merch discounts, they get access to live virtual events and bonus episodes, like the most recent one, explaining podcast economics from the inside. Your steadfast support helps us stay independent and ambitious at Planet Money.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  You can sign up at plus.npr.org. That's right. This episode was produced by James Snead. It was fact checked by Ciarán Waddes, mastered by Natasha Branch and edited by Jess Jang. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Nick Fountain. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Stay safe.

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