HUNDREDS of people including a TV star and leading sports figures have been stung by a multi-million pound Ponzi scheme uncovered by City of London police.
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Business Consulting International is accused of scamming £80M off around 600 people in a pyramid selling frenzy and hidden much of the cash in secret accounts around the world, after blowing a substantial portion of the gains on flashy cars, such as Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, including a 612 Scaglietti like the one in the photo.
In a sad twist to the tale, many of the victims of the alleged fraud refuse to believe that the people at BCI they trusted with their fortunes could have done the dirty on them.
“Some of the victims point-blank refuse to believe that they may have been victims of a crime,” said Detective Superintendent Bob Wishart, of City of London Police.
“They think these people are their friends and they have placed complete trust and have given over a lot of information and it is very difficult to break that link of trust.
“Consequently, we get this situation where we find they do not believe us. Even though [the accused] have been arrested and we have searched their homes and offices and closed them down, the victims still do not believe anything is wrong.”
Not only are some of the victims sceptical of the investigation’s findings – they blame the police’s interventions for bringing BCI down. The identities of the famous people involved is not yet being made public.
Ponzi schemes work by pulling in new ‘investors’, whose money is used to pay the previous group high returns and so on. At some point, when new investors are hard to come by, returns dry up and the scheme collapses.
The most spectacular Ponzi case to come out of the recent bank-led recession was uncovered in New York, when friend to the high-rollers Bernie Madoff made off with some £40B. He is now in prison.
In the London mini-Madoff case, three men – two from Surrey, one from London – have been arrested on charges of conspiracy to defraud, money laundering and fraud by misrepresentation.
The scam allegedly occurred between 2007 and 2008.
