Excerpt
August 15, 2025, Interview: "Like many doomed ideas searching for capital, Charles Ponzi started out with a simple plan to arbitrage coupons. With charisma and false promises, his scheme quickly ballooned into one of history's most famous fraud cases. Even though Ponzi was convicted and imprisoned more than a century ago, his infamy lives on. Ponzi or pyramid schemes, which seek to pay earlier investors with new investor funds, remain common today, with cryptocurrency opening new fraud opportunities. And his legacy is still being scrutinized, most recently in the Apple Original podcast Easy Money: The Charles Ponzi Story."
Citations
Soltes, Eugene, and Danielle Kost. “AI Schemes Could 'Make Bernie Madoff's Fraud Look Trivial': Interview with Eugene Soltes.” Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School, August 15, 2025. .