Many bank workers are facing eminent sack over the possible crash of the widely popular pyramid scheme, MMM Nigeria, according to a report by Naij.com.
The news platform says that “some banks are seriously considering sacking their workers who were found guilty of introducing customers to the Ponzi scheme”.
Many Nigerians were thrown into panic in the morning as the popular pyramid scheme, Mavrodi Mundial Moneybox, MMM, shared a confusing message on its website stating that it has frozen all confirmed Mavros, otherwise known as money due for withdrawal for one month.
“The bankers were said to have got customers of financial institutions involved in the scheme in order for them to make 10 per cent commission,” the report said.
“Just learnt hundreds of bankers may lose their jobs for luring their bank customers into investing in the failed MMM. Just for 10% commission,” a source said.
When the MMM scheme began to gain steam, Nigerian banks – and the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Security Exchange Commission – warned their customers to not participate in the scheme.
Some banks even wrote letters to their customers warning them away from MMM.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has replied a Nigerian who accused the agency of “doing nothing” in the face of a possible crash of the wildly popular pyramid scheme, MMM.
“If it looks or sounds too good to be true, it almost always is. Do NOT patronize wonder banks. Protect yourself,” the commission tweeted.
A Familiar Pattern
According to Wikipedia, МММ was a Russian company that perpetrated one of the world’s largest Ponzi schemes of all time, in the 1990s. By different estimates from 5 to 40 million people lost up to $10 billion. The exact figures are not known even to the founders.
MMM took its name from its founder, Sergey Mavrodi. He founded MMM in 1989 and the scheme was declared bankrupt three years later leading to the disappearance of Mavrodi until his arrest in 2003.
He was convicted in 2007 in his home country of defrauding 10,000 investors out of 110 million rubles, the equivalent of $4.3 million. MMM is not his first ‘wonder bank’ creation.
MMM collapsed in Zimbabwe in September 2016 leaving thousands of people, among them civil servants and vendors, with thousands of dollars trapped in the ponzi scheme.
