EB-5 Investing Is About People, Not Projects

Charles Dickens may have been the first person to publicly entertain the Ponzi scheme in his 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens created a fictional character by the name of Montague Tigg who defrauded investors by paying off early insurance policyholders claims with premiums from new policyholders.

About 80 years later, Charles Ponzi officially made the scheme famous. In subsequent decades, various high-profile frauds followed, with the most memorable in recent history perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, who admitted to orchestrating one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.