Thousands of Zimbabweans including civil servants and local vendors are in a state of financial trauma after the popular online Ponzi scheme MMM Global recently collapsed in the country.
The
social financial network, which relied on an accelerating number of new
members to pay off the old, abruptly terminated its services last week
leaving participants who had invested thousands of dollars stranded.
Zimbabweans
have in the past months been joining the online investment scheme in
droves in a bid “to get rich quickly”. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe had
warned people that the scheme was fraudulent and there was no legal
recourse in the event they lost their money.
The
scheme advertises itself as a mutual aid fund under which recruited
members contribute money to assist others and are promised investment
returns of 30 percent per month. Some of the people left counting their
losses told The Herald that they received emails that the scheme had
been suspended until September 15.
One Mr. Tinashe Muza of Harare said:
All along things were moving in the right direction and we now have nowhere to claim our investments. When
we started putting our funds in the scheme one could get assistance
within seven days but things later changed to 14 days and when we were
shut out the waiting period was 21 days. What it simply means is that
the number of people in need of help has outnumbered the number of
people joining. Right now we have nowhere to get our money which we
invested.
The RBZ said the schemes were fraudulent as existing investors were:
paid
money not from genuine market investment of their funds, but from
contributions made by new investors, until a point when the scheme can
no longer attract new investors.
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