“After months of investigating allegations of a $140 million Ponzi scheme, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office has made numerous criminal referrals and issued $1 million in fines,🚨ensnaring a number of state GOP figures.”
More Republican #corruption‼️
#PonziScheme #Republicans #Georgia #USPol
https://abcnews.com/US/georgia-officials-issue-criminal-referrals-fines-alleged-140/story?id=130526685&cid
Why Bitcoin Could Hit $0We're watching the worst crypto crash since the FTX scandal. #BenMcKenzie explains what's driving the crash, and why this one could take down the rest of the economy with it.
#ponzischeme #ponzi #bitcoin #crypto #etf #cryptocrash #MorePerfectUnion #shorts #economy #uspol
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IXNUM4FMqNs
When #Bitcoin hit 100K I recommended that anyone holding it sell, as a #PonziScheme can only last so long. Bet you wish you had.
When the affected players approached the businessman, he apparently claimed to have incurred heavy losses. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/sports/news/millions-at-stake-babar-rizwan-shaheen-ponzi-scheme-report-k1xj9d5l?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #PonziScheme #BabarAzam #MohammadRizwan #ShaheenShahAfridi
Strange, isn't it, that your newsfeed isn't full of demands from businesses and consumers to fix the latency of generative AI chatbots, and stories about the crisis of access? ("I'm losing business because my prompt engineers can't get responses quick enough!")
Instead, the loudest voices are the big tech companies screaming that they need gigawatt-consuming data centres.
Can you spot the disconnect?
Ein spannender Artikel zu KI-Blase mit einer ausfĂĽhrlichen Analyse der Struktur und den Auswirkungen des derzeitigen KI-Hype.
Leider nur 48 Stunden (bis 16.01.25 ?) bei Golem frei verfĂĽgbar.. Immerhin
#kiblase #kihype #ponzischeme #schneeballsystem
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KI: Jetzt wird es teuer fĂĽr alle - Golem.de
https://www.golem.de/news/ki-jetzt-wird-es-teuer-fuer-alle-2601-204124.html
KI: Jetzt wird es teuer fĂĽr alle - via Golem.de
https://www.golem.de/news/ki-jetzt-wird-es-teuer-fuer-alle-2601-204124.html
"Das Ganze gleicht einem Pyramidensystem"
"In Pennsylvania stiegen die Stromerzeugungspreise binnen eines Jahres von knapp 29 US-Dollar pro Megawatt am Tag auf knapp 270 US-Dollar"
"KI-Blogger Ed Citron nennt die derzeit zu beobachtenden Auswüchse „Enshittifinancial Crisis“"
"KI-Rechenzentren kosten Unsummen und erwirtschaften nichts. Geld verdienen daran nur wenige"
#aibubble #ponzischeme #enshittification
HISTORY: The Ponzi Scheme
Und so wird das "eigene" #Vermögen gesichert.
Solange irgendjemand "kauft", bleibt der #Wert erhalten.
Worin besteht eigentlich der Unterschied zu einem #Schneeballsystem (#PonziScheme)?
Ahh, ach ja: beim #PonziScheme werden Alt-Investoren ausgezahlt.
Das verringert natĂĽrlich die eigene Solvenz.
Dummer Fehler.
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/usa-michael-dell-will-25-millionen-kindern-sparkapital-schenken-a-596f7d2e-148b-4d32-838d-050c69d3e847
"By the conventional measures of corporate governance, OpenAI presents an impossibility. The organization projects $12.7 billion in revenue for 2025, commands a $500 billion valuation following its October share sale, and sits at the center of a $1.4 trillion infrastructure commitment spanning the world’s largest technology companies. Yet according to IRS Form 990 filings accessible through ProPublica’s database, OpenAI’s financial audits through fiscal year 2022 were conducted by Fontanello, Duffield & Otake, LLP—a San Francisco boutique firm with approximately twelve professionals specializing in nonprofits and early-stage entities.
No public disclosure announces a change in auditor since those filings. No Big Four accounting firm—Deloitte, PwC, EY, or KPMG—appears in any corporate communication regarding OpenAI’s financial oversight. For context, 98% of S&P 500 companies retain Big Four auditors, a concentration driven not by preference but by practical necessity: detecting material misstatement in complex, high-velocity organizations requires institutional capacity that boutique firms cannot provide.
This auditor gap would be merely curious in isolation. What transforms it into a systemic concern is the architecture of capital flows that OpenAI both enables and depends upon—a structure that investment analyst Michael Burry recently characterized as a “fraud flywheel” in social media posts backed by network diagrams mapping inter-firm transactions."
Chinese 'Cryptoqueen' Zhimin Qian sentenced to 11+ years in UK for a ÂŁ5 billion Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, defrauding 128,000 people https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/world/chinese-cryptoqueen-jailed-bitcoin-ponzi-scheme-yv3t6p6n?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #cryptoqueen #bitcoin #defrauding #ponzischeme
My Strange Addiction: Ponzi Schemes
Ponzi Schemes Change a Man
"Mr. Trump and his Silicon Valley backers may have taken different journeys to get to their embrace of crypto, but they have ended up in the same place: The government, and the population, exists to serve the interests of their businesses, their enrichment, and their aggrandizement. So the trick of libertarianism wasn’t on them. It was on us.
For decades, libertarians tried to sell us on wild notions like ending the public school system, abolishing the police, ripping up all environmental protection, canceling the Federal Reserve. None of those notions succeeded, perhaps because they attacked real-world institutions that we understand. It took an obscure technology, fueled by the Silicon Valley hype machine, mountains of dirty money and a massive gambling boom, to persuade millions of voters to embrace an extreme vision of individual freedom and decentralized money — and somehow overlook the authoritarianism and criminality that accompanied it all along.
Crypto is the most successful libertarian project in American history. A technology developed to escape the state is now at the political center of a global superpower. Crypto has become a machine for transferring control and wealth from the many to the few, a bribery-as-a-service platform for buying and selling influence among authoritarian oligarchs. It’s the perfect technological expression of the Trump moment: our country’s crypto era."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/opinion/crypto-trump-libertarianism-corruption.html
#USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Libertarians #Libertarianism #PonziScheme #Kleptocracy
"In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission asked a federal judge to pause a civil fraud case against Mr. Sun. The pause was granted. In May, Mr. Sun’s position as the top holder of Mr. Trump’s memecoin earned him, and dozens of other top $TRUMP owners, an invitation to a dinner at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. There, Mr. Sun received a gold watch.
In another era (in other words, a few years ago), we would have already had congressional hearings and law enforcement investigations into the president’s crypto business interests. But the Supreme Court’s recent decision related to presidential immunity signals that such moves could end up being practically superfluous.
The Department of Justice will not indict a sitting president, and to start his term, Mr. Trump fired 18 inspectors general, who might otherwise have been able to investigate and shine light on the crypto activities of this administration. In February, he ordered the Justice Department to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits the bribery of foreign officials. (Four months later, the suspension was lifted.) Enforcement agencies have shifted their priorities away from crypto, while the administration has helped usher in legislation favored by the crypto industry.
Mr. Trump and his sons’ enormous accumulation of crypto wealth appears set to continue throughout his term. There seems to be no upper bound to how much foreign money can be channeled toward him. It’s an open door to a form of corruption, at the highest level, that Americans have never had to confront. But we must confront the dark possibilities it presents."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/opinion/world-liberty-financial-crypto-trump.html
#USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #PonziScheme #Kleptocracy
"At 4:50 pm on October 10, when traditional markets were closed, Donald Trump launched a new salvo in the simmering US–China trade war. Likely referring to China’s dramatically expanded restrictions on the rare earth minerals it almost singlehandedly controls, Trump posted that he would retaliate with an imminent 100% tariff increase on the country and new export controls on software. The timing muted the announcement’s impact on US equities markets and left Asian markets largely untouched,1 but crypto absorbed the full shock of the Trump-induced panic. The episode compressed a global liquidity crisis into less than an hour — a sign that the market most eager to be taken seriously may also be the one least equipped to handle real-world shocks.
Bitcoin shed more than $10,000 in a matter of minutes, with the flash crash wiping out at least 10%a of its value instantly and pushing prices 15% below their morning levels. Traders holding $19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated in a blink, and complaints erupted on social media as crypto platform glitches exacerbated losses.
The worst of the chaos was over quickly, and Trump’s Sunday retreat from his bold threats made only days prior helped to further stabilize jumpy markets — though bitcoin continues to trade down about 13% below its price from that morning, and 16% below its all-time high set only the prior Monday. But the October 10 panic gave a valuable reminder of the frightening speed at which crypto markets can unravel, and a dire warning for a future scenario in which crypto is further integrated into traditional finance."
https://www.citationneeded.news/anatomy-of-a-crypto-meltdown/
"After making millions of dollars selling branded bibles, cologne, sneakers and autographed guitars, the president has extracted tens of millions of dollars more from social media and news companies who settled lawsuits brought by Trump that few legal experts believed had any merit. His wife Melania has landed a $40mn documentary deal with Amazon, far eclipsing industry rates.
But the heart of Trump’s newfound wealth is a rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire built by the president and his family. According to a Financial Times investigation, this business has already reaped more than $1bn in pre-tax profits over the past year, in part thanks to a crypto boom fuelled by the administration’s own industry-friendly policies.
The calculation of the income from these crypto projects includes only realised profits. Trump’s crypto ventures have also boosted his net worth on paper by billions of dollars. For example, his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social and a bitcoin-treasury business, is now worth $1.9bn."
https://www.ft.com/content/2ea2b35b-e009-42ed-b4d3-6b21aa9b2a13
#USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #PonziScheme #Kleptocracy
I’m sure this is fine.
“'Very troubling': AI's self-investment spree sets off bubble alarms on Wall Street”
#AIBubble #PonziScheme
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/very-troubling-ais-self-investment-spree-sets-off-bubble-alarms-on-wall-street-160524518.html
