marskey dee 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.
NAIJ.com 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 the first letters of the founders’
surnames - Sergei Mavrodi, Olga Melnikova and
Vyacheslav Mavrodi.
However, some people believe that it 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. However, there were some problems.
In January 1992 the company was accused of tax
evasion. This led to problems with the financial
support of company's operation. It struggled.
But how did MMM achieve that? The company
promised annual returns for up to 1000% to
private investors. It sounded quite attractive, and
a lot of people were eager to invest. With strong
advertising and naive people (no one heard about
scams during that time), MMM became one of the
most successful companies in Russia.
However, the success didn’t last for long.
Eventually, the company was shut down in 1994
and it declared bankruptcy in 1997. Unfortunately,
everything didn't end there. After 14 years, the
company reopened as “MMM Global.”
MMM in Nigeria
MMM started in Nigeria in November 2015, when
it launched a new website for Nigerian audience.
In Nigeria, the company decided to lower the
standards and promised profit was 30% per
month.
The primary target of MMM was unemployed
people. The number of people that signed up by
the late 2016 was shocking - 2.4 million! They
hoped that MMM would give them easy money
and they had no doubts.
Unfortunately, after a year of work in Nigeria,
MMM announced the freezing of all members
accounts.
According to the company, the reason was
“systems overload and the negative attention
brought on by the Government and mass media.”
After the freeze of members’ accounts, people
started to panic. Sadly, the worst thing that
happened was that the panic led them to even
attempt to end their lives.
Things got so serious that even the Lagos State
Emergency Management Agency asked the
citizens to look out for each other and call the
emergency number if someone was trying to kill
himself.
Surprisingly, on 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. People believed in the
company and wanted to get a lot of money
almost out of nowhere.