Zimbabweans Lose Thousands Of United States Dollars To Ponzi Scheme
The sudden closure of E-Creator Zimbabwe which had lured hundreds of Zimbabweans with promises of easy cash has left many people worse off after they had invested their earnings into the Ponzi scheme.
The “firm” closed a few days ago after it failed to transfer money to its employees’ Ecocash accounts. Anyone who joined E-creator was called an employee.
Reports suggest that people were asked to pay US$15 to become VIP1 “employees”. By the end of the month, this money would purportedly increase to US$50.
A VIP2 employee required a minimum of US$100 and a maximum recharge of US$500.
VIP3 employees needed a minimum of US$500 and a maximum of US$2000.
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Those who ran the scheme made it mandatory for employees who wanted to upgrade an account from one VIP to another, to invite a certain number of people to join the scheme.
Many employees of the online company had reportedly worked hard to become VIP2 employees.
However, a few days ago, E-Creator admitted that it had failed to honour withdrawals claiming that it obtained the E-Creator Merchant Account of Ecocash which it said needed to be connected with Ecocash before allowing employees to access their cash.
It later informed its subscribers that it had been forced to close after an alleged Chinese national resident in Zimbabwe siphoned all deposits made by the company’s employees.
In a statement posted on social media, E-Creator claimed that one Zhao Jiaotong, who allegedly started the Ponzi scheme, had been fraudulently withdrawing cash from E-creator employees’ EcoCash accounts with plans to skip the border.
Speaking to ZBC News, Claris Bwanya, an E-Creator VIP 1 employee, said he will never join a Ponzi scheme again. He said:
I will never involve myself in these scams again, I joined barely two weeks ago.
Another employee who preferred to be anonymous said:
Abraham must be tortured, for real. He will tell us where he put our monies. He shouldn’t behave like this!
We invested funds until we reached US$500 thinking we are now making US$20 dollars per day and now the platform closes just like that…
On 04 July, E-Creator manager Abraham Mutambu told ZBC News there were working on fixing some glitches on the EcoCash platform. He said:
The company is fixing Ecocash issues as there was disorder, some were receiving double payment after they had withdrawn once, for instance, one could withdraw US$100 and he or she would receive US$200.
So we are maintaining our financial system and those with delayed withdrawals, by Saturday noon they would have received their money with an interest of 4%.
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator pays returns to its investors from their own money or from the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned.
The scheme relies on attracting new investors and using their investments to provide returns to earlier investors.
The scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, an Italian-born swindler who became notorious in the early 20th century for running such a scheme.
Ponzi promised investors high returns on investments in international postal reply coupons, but he was actually using the money from new investors to pay off earlier investors.
More: Pindula News
