42. Caritas
Year: 1992-1994
Approx. Amount: $1-$5 billion*
Company / Person Involved: Ioan Stoica
Caritas was a Romanian Ponzi scheme that racked up two to eight million depositors (the most-often cited figure is four million). The scheme’s investors invested as much as $5 billion before Caritas went bankrupt in 1994 with a debt of $450 million. Caritas founder Ioan Stoica was at the center of the scandal.
Caritas @libertatea / Twitter.com
Caritas labeled itself a “mutual aid” organization, saying it was dedicated to helping poor Romanians after the fall of the USSR. Caritas said that if people invested money, it would return the cash to them at an 800% profit in half a year. That never happened, and people lost a lot of money. Stoica was sentenced to over seven years in a Romanian prison for his fraudulence.