Dave Barry Quotes

In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.

No Ponzi schemer tells anyone exactly how it works. The purpose of a Ponzi scheme is to trick people, to take the money and run.

My favorite pre-Ponzi schemer was known as '520 Percent Miller' because he promised 10 percent returns a week, or 520 percent a year. Of course he was just using new investors' money to pay old investors, and soon he was on the lam.

My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

When running a Ponzi scheme, how does one avoid enormous, unexpected withdrawals - runs on the bank, so to speak - that would pull back the curtain and reveal a little man blowing smoke? One way would be to attract a core of investors who could be counted on to never withdraw more than a small percentage of principal each year.

Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

As I've said before, free money scams are a problem.

We had a mission at PayPal - which was to create a new financial system, a new world currency, and we failed. We were a financial success, but we didn't succeed at the purpose of our company.

The real sin with Social Security is that it's a long-term rip-off and a short-term scam.

Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.

The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away.

Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.

I got a chain letter by fax. It's very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

For those of you who believe in the Social Security Trust Fund, you can’t trust it; there is no fund, and no one is secure …. A Ponzi scheme.

This was a massive Ponzi scheme and the biggest crime against the American economy in our lifetimes—in fact, ever…. You had various traders buying each other’s products to artificially keep the prices up so that the bubble didn’t collapse.

It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by those receipts.

Now, a lot of people didn't know him at all - it went through feeder funds, so they wouldn't even have known anything about Bernie Madoff. But everybody finds a justification for their behavior, and obviously, Bernie had a half dozen justifications in his own mind.

Ponzi and all of his successors tap into a fundamental part of human nature. One part of our brain tells us this is too good to be true. The other side tells us this is too good to miss. The key to any con is getting a mark to tip to the too-good-to-miss side.

The combination of Ponzi's huge personality and the enormous if brief success of his scheme, combined with the tremendous publicity which surrounded it, is ultimately what attached his name to it.

These facts are clear: Trump University was an unlicensed enterprise promising students that they would become wealthy by learning Trump's real estate tips and strategies, taught by his handpicked instructors.

My retirement plan was in place but Bernie Maidoff with my money.

Astronauts are the only kind of celebrity I know who can have a line of people waiting for their autograph, even if the line of people does not know in advance the astronaut's name.