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A comment on The Eponymous Mr. Ponzi. Parent comment

Re:The Eponymous Mr. Ponzi by mikeash on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @12:51PM (#20868485)
The international reply coupon racket was legitimate, though. It was kind of shitty, since it was abusing a loophole in the rules to extract money from postal services, but it was legal. In terms of morality, it’s little different from arbitraging stocks.

The problem was that this racket sucked, and instead of giving up on it he decided to turn it into a proper scam.

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Re:The Eponymous Mr. Ponzi by conistonwater on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @03:14PM (#20870054)
He never even began to implement the postal coupon idea, it was a scam from the start. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-ponzi-we-trust-640...

> Of course, there was no network of agents. Nor, for that matter, did Ponzi expend any effort to corner the market on postal reply coupons. A final audit of his company's assets after the whole business was over turned up $61 worth of the coupons, according to Dunn.

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