Sergey Mavrodi, the founder of MMM, a Russian company that perpetrated one of the world’s largest Ponzi schemes of all time, is dead.
According to a report by Moskovsky Komsomolets, the founder of the MMM series of financial pyramid schemes, Mavrodi, died in Moscow at the age of 62.
Report gathered that Mavrodi was taken to a city hospital from a bus stop overnight Monday, March 26, after he felt weakness and pain in the chest area.
“The emergency team has failed to save his life. He died this morning,” the report said. The preliminary cause of death is a heart attack.
Mavrodi has been elected as a lawmaker in 1994, but his immunity was taken away in 1996.
He was convicted in a Russian court of defrauding 10,000 investors out of 110 million rubles ($4.3 million).
Mavrodi claimed he is not the beneficiary of the donations and he is not used to flamboyant lifestyle. His true charges of which he was later convicted of is tax fraud though he claimed that MMM scheme is not a business, but a mutual donation program of which there is no law against such.
MMM stands for Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox. The company got a lot of money from people – it was making about 50 million USD each day. MMM started as a company that imported office equipment.
In January 2017 MMM Nigeria reopened. Also, on February 11th the company announced the lifting of the withdrawal limits on 2017 mavro. Investors were angry because of the delayed, and unfulfilled payments and some people left the scheme. The investors who stayed loyal to the company were given assurance of getting back their money.
But the company stated that in order to get the pre-2017 money, investors should add new money. And the more they add, the higher their chances to get the previous money back. Though MMM came back, it could not regain the trust of the bulk of the investors failed to make huge impact it had when it was first introduced.
About 110 countries suffered from MMM, including various African countries like Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe.