MMM Nigeria - a prominent multi-marketing Ponzi scheme - has recently announced that it is making a comeback enabling
Bitcoin as a form of payment. MMM was founded by Sergei Mavrodi in Russia in the 1990s, the original scheme has collapsed resulting in participants losing billions of dollars.
However, it has blossomed again with one simple model: participants committed to sending money to other participants and after a month, they got their ‘investments’ back plus 30 percent interest from other participants of the pyramid.
There is a high risk that this lending money chain will eventually collapse and millions of people will lose their money… again. However, the number of participants keeps growing, even despite the questionable logic of the whole enterprise and recent daunting events.
In mid-December 2016,
MMM has frozen accounts of participants, reportedly, more than three million Nigerians were affected. The later statement said that the scheme had to temporarily suspend operations due to the heavy workload in the system.