Charles Ponzi’s Schemes

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I said back in our episode on the south Sea Bubble that I kind of wanted to do one on Charles Ponzy. So here it is. His name is synonymous with one particular kind of fraud today. But until I started researching this episode, I did not realize just how short lived this scheme that made him famous was. Like I imagined, if his name becomes synonymous with the thing that he was running this scam for years and years, a long term identity for now not the case. Carlo Ponzi was born on March two, Lugo, Italy. He was the only child of arrest A and Ponzi. Arreste was a postal worker and Emelde's family was from Parma, Italy. The Ponzi's life was comfortable but fairly modest, and after they moved to Parma when Carlo was still a child, Emelde entertained him with stories of the opulent homes and luxurious lifestyles of their wealthier relatives in the area. Oreste and Emelda wanted Carlo to become a lawyer and maybe eventually work his way up to being a judge, something that would be a little more prestigious and have more income than what they had, so they sent him to a private academy. He became fluent in French there. Oreste died before Carlo started college, but he left Carlo enough money to pay for an education at La Sapienza Universita de Roma. Like a lot of people who are away from home for the first time, when Carlo got to college, he made the most of his newfound freedom. He was attractive, he was charismatic, He made friends really easily, and a lot of the friends had he made had a lot more money than he did. Some descriptions of him make it sound like he immediately started doing petty crimes, but it seems more like he just burned through his inheritance buying clothes and going to the opera and trying to keep up with his new circle of fancy partying friends, including drinking and gambling. But after a couple of years he had frittered or gambled his inheritance away, and he was failing his classes. An uncle who had become something of a father figure to him suggested that he get a job, maybe as a clerk, something that would be stable but not require a degree. Carlo hated this idea. He could not afford this extravagant lifestyle he had been trying to keep up, but he had gotten used to it and it was what he wanted. Getting some kind of low level job felt like an insult and something that all of his friends would judge him for. I can understand all of this. Meanwhile, his family was becoming increased singly frustrated with him. They were having to loan him money to pay his debts or cover various fines on his behalf, and this became not just expensive but also embarrassing. So his uncle made another suggestion that he might immigrate to the United States and try to make a life for himself there. So some relatives pulled their money and they bought him a ticket aboard the s S Vancouver. They gave him a gift of about two hundred dollars to get him started. Although Carlo didn't really know what he was going to do once he got to the US, this did seem more appealing to him than getting a desk job in Italy. He also seems to have thought it might give him a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his mother. It does seem like he regretted how much his time and college had really disappointed her, so he took his uncle's suggestion. He departed for Boston in November of nineteen o three. Unfortunately, though he gambled and drank away most of that two hundred dollars during the edge, Carlo did not stay in Boston for long. Another relative offered him a job at his freight company in Pittsburgh, and Carlo traveled there by train, spending most of the trip trying to improve his knowledge of English. He did not like that job in Pittsburgh, though, so he quit, and for a while he traveled around New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island doing whatever work he could find. Most of that work involved manual labor, things like painting signs and working at a laundry. At this point, there was not a standardized spelling of Ponzi in the US, and he spelled his name in a few different ways. He also sometimes used a different name, the surname of Bianchie. By nineteen o seven, Ponzi was fluent in English, French and Italian, and that was really useful for working in places with a large immigrant community. He went to Montreal and, using the name Charles Bianchi, got a job at Banco's Russi, which was a bank catering to the city's Italian immigrant population. Many banks with a predominantly Italian clientele invested in Italian securities that paid three percent interest. The bank would pass two thirds of that on to customers on their interest bearing accounts, while using the rest to cover expenses and turn a profit. But Luigi Zarossi, owner of Banco Zarosi, was offering customers six percent interest, tripling the amount of interest that customers were seeing on their accounts. Might have seemed too good to be true, and it was so. Rossi did not have some kind of secret way to get more money from the bank's investments. He was just paying established account holders interest by skimming money from the deposits that people made when they opened up new accounts and from money that customers were trying to send to their family back in Italy through the bank. Of course, this was both criminal and unsustainable, and as it started to unravel, Zarosi fled to Mexico. At first, investigators thought this scheme was Zerosi's work alone, but then one of the bank's employees took his own life and another was arrested after being accused of stealing from a customer. Even as investigators started digging into more people who worked at the bank, Ponzi stayed in Montreal, looking after Zarossi's wife and daughters and purportedly helping with the investigation, but then not totally clear why he decided it was time to leave. On August eight, Ponzi stole a check from the back of a check book while he was visiting the offices of Canadian warehousing company. He made out the check for four hundred twenty three dollars and fifty eight cents, and he forged the signature of the company's office manager, Damien Bournier. Ponzi cashed the check at a bank and then spent pretty much all the money on the clothing and supplies that he would need to get out of Montreal and set himself up somewhere else. Meanwhile, a clerk at the bank became suspicious of the out of sequence check and the signature on it, and contacted the authorities Ponzi was arrested and immediately confessed, and he feigned epilepsy so that he would be housed in the prison infirmary rather than in a regular cell until he stood trial. Ponzi was convicted, he spent the next twenty months incarcerated at sam Vincent DePaul Penitentiary. While he was there, he worked his way up from being a clerk in the prison blacksmiths shop to working in the wardens office, and he wrote to his mother about what was going on, although in his account this was all kind of a misunderstanding and he was really distinguishing himself in his work with the warden. Just a couple of weeks after being released from prison in nineteen ten, Ponzi headed back to the US by train in the company of five other Italian men. At this point, US immigration law banned immigration from China, and while there weren't limits or quotas for other countries yet, various so called undesirables were also banned, including anarchists, sex workers, people with contagious diseases, and people likely to become a public charge. None of these five men on the train had valid identification papers with them, and none of them spoke English, so when officials boarded the train near the U. S border, they questioned Ponzi. Ponzi said he did not know any of these men that he was with. He said he had run into an old friend at the train station, and the friend had asked him to watch over this group, basically as a favor. It's not clear whether this was something Palsy actively planned or whether he took any money for doing it, but that old friend was really the man who had fled during the Bank os Arrassi collapse. After being accused of stealing from a customer, Ponzi was charged with smuggling quote undesirable aliens into the US. He took a plea deal, thinking it he'd just have to pay a small fine. Instead, he was sentenced to two years in federal prison and find five hundred dollars. He once again worked as a cleric while incarcerated, including translating other people's mail so the warden could read it. He served as full sentence plus an additional month because he did not have the money to pay his fine. Once he was out of prison, Ponzi again worked at a range of jobs, mainly in the southern US. While working in a mining camp in Alabama. He donated some of his skin to a nurse named Pearl Gossip, who was badly burned when a gasoline fueled sterilizer that she was using exploded. Ponzi reportedly donated almost two hundred square inches of his skin over the course of three surgeries, requiring several months to recover and contracting pleurisy in the process, and also expecting nothing in return. This almost certain we saved Gosset's life, Especially in the context of the rest of Ponzi's life. This story seems incredible enough that Tracy went on a little bit of a quest to try to corroborate it, and it does seem to have really happened. Gossett's initial injury was covered in the local West Blocked in Alabama newspaper, and Ponzi's skin donation was covered in the Tampa Times. On December, he apparently sent a clipping of this or another article on his donation to the warden in Atlanta, who showed it to a reporter for the Boston Globe. After Ponzi became famous, Okay, what I kept finding references to this and nobody was providing any details, and I was like for real though, because this sounds like something somebody would say to aggrandize themselves. I'm a great guy. Yeah, there are these news reports about it. We will talk more about when Ponzy got to Boston after we take a quick sponsor break. Charles Ponzi moved to Boston in nineteen seventeen, and around that time he seems to have settled on that name rather than going by Carlo or using a pseudonym like Bianchie. He had been working with a company that sold freight vehicles overseas, and being trilingual came in pretty handy there. When he got to Boston, he started working as a clerk at JR. Pool Company, which was an import export firm, another good place for somebody who spoke three languages. In Boston, he met Rose Nico, who he married in nineteen eighteen. Ponzi's mother was apparently worried that he wasn't being honest with her about the time he had spent in prison, so during their engagement, Emmelde wrote Rose a letter explaining everything. Of course, that was the explanation that she had heard from her son, which made him sound wrongfully accused. Rose already thought really well of Charles. She knew about things like his skin donation and his attention to the Zerosi family during the Bonco zar Rossi scandal. She carried on with their relationship, and she did not let Charles know that she knew because she didn't want him to think she thought any less of him. Rose's father ran a produce business, which Charles took over, but that business quickly failed. In some accounts, Ponzi ran it into the ground through sheer mismanagement, but in others, this business was already really floundering, and Ponzi was basically making a last ditch effort to try to save it. In Ponzi was arrested for stealing more than five thousand pounds of cheese, but his name was misspelled on the warrant. This was not a case of the reflection of various spellings of Ponzi that he had used over time. There was just a you in place of the end. That misspelling led to a series of delays, and eventually this whole thing fizzled out. Ponzi then tried to start up an international business directory called trey Ter's Guide, which would make its money through ads. Another good thing for somebody to make use of their three languages. Doing he applied for a startup loan at Hanover Trust Bank, but they turned him down, and so this effort also fizzled out. But then someone in Spain wrote Ponzi to ask for a copy of the Trader's Guide, not realizing that it had already folded, and according to Ponzi's account, that person had included an international reply coupon. These are not used much anymore, and many nations no longer issue them at all, but the International Universal Postal Union established these in nineteen o six to make it easier for people in its member countries to correspond with one another. If you wrote to someone who was living in another country, you could include a coupon, and then the recipient could exchange that coupon for the postage that they would need for their reply. When these coupons were first created, their value was roughly equivalent no matter where they were bought and no matter where they were redeemed. But after World War One the value of various European currencies fell, and Ponzi realized he could take advantage of these exchange rates. He could buy reply coupons in countries where the currency was weaker than in the US, and then he could sell them in the US for a profit. Pondz rented office space at twenty seven School Street in Boston in December of nineteen nine, opening a business that he called the Securities Exchange Company. People would give him their money and he would give them a promissory note entitling them to their money plus interest when it matured. He guaranteed a fifty percent profit after forty five days and a one profit after ninety days. That first, he needed to convince people to participate in this. He owed a man named Joseph Daniels money for office furniture he had bought, and when he fell behind on the payments, he offered Daniels the opportunity to invest. He promised him a hundred percent return over just two months. Ponzi recruited investors from Boston's predominantly Italian North End, many of whom were just ordinary people with a little bit of money they wanted to invest. Or were people who trusted Ponzi with their entire life savings. As words spread and his business grew, Ponzi hired a secretary and a sales team and opened satellite offices in other parts of the northeastern US. He posted notices in multiple languages that started with phrases like do you want to get rich quick? He boasted about having a whole network of people in Europe who were buying coupons on his behalf and a confidential method of exchanging them for cash in the US. As the money rolled in, Ponzi started making investments of his own. He bought a house in Lexington, Massachusetts for thirty nine thousand dollars. That was nine thousand dollars in cash, plus a twenty dollar certificate from the securities exchanged company that was payable for the rest of it six weeks later. The seller's attorney seems to have been a little nervous about this arrangement and got Pons to also use a thirty thousand dollars certificate of deposit from an actual regular bank as a backup. Okay, as an aside. I'm trying to understand this. Yeah, So it's nine thousand dollars in cash and then the twenty thousand dollars certificate, and then the idea was that it would make enough profit that it would get to thirty k Yes, okay, yes, Okay, I just had this moment where I'm like, I don't understand the math um. Ponzi also invested in other businesses, including his former employer JR. Pool Company, the Napoli Macaroni Company, a construction company, and American Telephone. He bought City of Boston bonds and bought shares in multiple Boston banks, including a massive investment in Hanover Trust Bank, which had turned him down for that earlier loan. They also indulged in various luxuries, like buying a car and then upgrading that to a limousine with a hired driver. He brought his mother over from Italy. He also loaned people money, and he made donations to various charities. On July four, the Boston Post reported that Joseph Daniels had sued Ponzi for one million dollars. Although Ponzi publicly said this suit had no merit, He started opening bank accounts under false names to try to hide his money in case Daniels might be successful. This report also led to some of his customers asking for their money back, but this was temporary, and not long after the news broke of a lawsuit, he was bringing in a million dollars a week. By late July, newspapers were reporting on this Italian man with the office in on School Street and a supposedly full proof way to get rich quick. An article in the Boston Post on July twent fourth of nine twenty outlined Ponzi's guaranteed returns that we talked about earlier, and also noted that at least as of that moment, nothing seemed to be illegal about this. Two police officers who had been sent to investigate had wound up investing themselves. The Post also reported that Ponzi's estimated worth had grown to about eight point five million dollars, up from essentially zero the previous October. In yes, he may as well be a basillionaire at that point. In this article, Ponzi described what he was doing as a sure thing, one that he could continue to do for as long as exchange rates made stamps bought for a dollar overseas worth four dollars in the US. He was quoted as describing that first burst of inspiration with the reply coupon from Spain quote. I looked the coupon over I thought about its value. On the other side, I said to myself, if I can buy one of these stamps in Spain for one cent and cash it for six cents in the United States, just because the rate of money exchanges higher here. Why can't I buy hundreds, thousands, millions of these coupons. I'll make five cents on every one of this particular kind, so why not. This article did raise some doubts about whether Ponzi could continue to do this long term. There was an international postal conference schedule to take place in Spain that might adjust how these coupons worked, and for the most part, Italy and France had both already stopped issuing them, but Ponzi expressed that he was really confident that he could keep this going. The next day, the Post reported that Arrival Get Rich Quick Company had opened up next door to Ponzi, the old colony for an exchange company, which had also hired a ballyhoo Man like at a side show to draw in customers. Even without the ballyhoo Man, accounts described the area around Ponzi's office as completely chaotic, thronged with people who wanted in on the deal. The Post also reported that more investigations were getting underway into Ponzi's business, including a collaboration among international authorities. Uh, This whole hiring a bally hu Man to holler at people in the street to kind of invest cracks me up. Also, Ponzi found the whole ballyhu Man situation very annoying. They've out posied me. Yeah. So. On the the Post print ed quotes from Clarence W. Barron, who at the time was running the Boston News Bureau and would later establish Baron's Business and Financial weekly name folks might recognize. Baron said that it was true that differences in postal rates could make it possible to sell reply coupons for a profit, but it was really only possible to do that on a very small scale. Baron also raised some very pointed questions, like if Ponzi was promising investors return, then why was he investing his own money in things like real estate and government bonds that did not even guarantee a ten percent return. An editor's note in the Financial section that same day noted that the difference between Spanish and American currency had never been as large as Ponzi was describing, and wondered how long European governments would allow their reply coupons to be used for a purpose, it was clearly not their intent. As a side note, the headline on the front page of the Post on July read quote questions the motive behind Ponzi scheme, And that's one of the first uses of Ponzi scheme in writing, if not the first. The Oxford English Dictionary actually cites a New York Tribune article from a few days later than this. Soon, U S District Attorney Daniel J. Gallagher was starting a federal investigation. Attorney General J. Weston Allen was heading up the investigation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Suffolk County District Attorney Joseph C. Pettier was also involved, as well as the Boston Police Department, various New England bankers, and Bank Commissioner Joseph Allen. On July Palz agreed not to take any more money until audits and investigations into his business were done, and he also agreed that he would keep offices open so that he could pay people whose notes had matured, or to refund money to people who wanted to get their money back. D A. Joseph C. Pettier characterized Ponzi is totally willing to do this and very friendly about the whole situation. Ponzi's branch offices and other cities and states started closing down as well. In news reports from that day, US District Attorney Daniel J. Gallagher was quoted as saying that the US government was the largest user of reply coupons in the world, and yet quote, the entire issue for the past twelve months of our government is only a small fraction of the entire number which must have been handled by Ponzi to account for the tremendous income which he claims to have made since December last The US was reportedly using only about two hundred thousand stamps a year, which sold for six cents each, so it just didn't add up that Ponzi was using them to bring in millions of dollars. On July twenty, after these and other news reports, there was a huge run on Ponzi's offices in Boston as worried people tried to get their money back. People fainted in the heat as they waited. A crowd smashed through a glass paneled door as they tried to get in. Ponzi reportedly returned a million dollars in a single day. Meanwhile, the Boston Post ran a report from the Boston News Bureau that said there was just no indication that international reply coupons were being moved with anywhere near the volume that Ponzi's scheme would have required, and that there was no increase anywhere in how many stamps were being read. Aamed Ponzi was publicly dismissive of all of this, joking with reporters and investigators and announcing plans to start a charitable Ponzi foundation. Although earlier reports had described Ponzi as charming and cheerful and happy to suspend new investments until the investigations were over, by July twenty nine, the Boston Post was quoting him as saying that the US was butting in on his business and investigating where it had no cause to a massive crowd of people wanting their money back jammed the alley adjacent to his office, and Ponzi brought them coffee and sandwiches at lunch. Meanwhile, speculators also made their way through the crowd, trying to buy notes off of people who wanted to cash them in. On July, auditor Edwin L. Pride started going through Ponzi's records. Meanwhile, the Postmaster of New York was quoted as saying the entire world supply of postage coupons would not be enough to bring in the money Ponzi claimed he had made on them. That would require at least one hundred sixty million coupons, but in New York, for example, there were only twenty seven thousand of them on hand. Meanwhile, Ponzi announced that he had been offered ten million dollars to sell the business, but hadn't decided what he wanted to do. Then, on the thirty one, he announced that he was suing Charles W. Baron for libel and also thinking about running for office once all of this was over. Although multiple people pointed out that what he said he was doing was just not possible, he still maintained that he had a way, but it would be unethical to breach the confidentiality of his European partners by explaining it. He also promised that he was going to donate a hundred thousand dollars to the Italian children's home. At this point, so many people were saying this doesn't end up, but there wasn't yet conclusive proof of it not adding up, but that I'll change on August second, and we'll talk about that after a sponsor break. On August second, nineteen twenty, a front page headline of the Boston Post read quote declares Ponzi is now hopelessly insolvent. What followed was an article written by William McMasters, who Ponzi had hired to do pr for him. McMasters had recognized that if Ponzi was the real deal, he would be a huge asset to McMaster's publicity career, but if pons was ripping people off, McMasters wanted to stop it. This article that he wrote for the Post alleged that Ponzi was two million dollars in debt. Without factoring in all the interests that was due on the Securities Exchange Companies notes when they matured. With that interest included, he was four point five million dollars in debt. He also said that Ponzi had sent no money abroad over the last sixty days, and that he had not deposited any money in any bank from anything that came from overseas. He had only deposited money that had been given to him by his investors. McMaster's article also spelled out just how massively Ponzi's scheme had grown, from issuing two hundred notes today on June eight to two thousand, nine hundred notes the day before he agreed to stop taking people's money. Palsy still definitely had supporters at this point, though. The Post reported in exchange with an anonymous bystander on the street who shouted out to Ponzi that he was the greatest Italian in history. Ponzi said that he was the third greatest because Columbus had discovered America and Marconi had discovered wireless, which that's a sentence to unpass. The bystanders shouted back at him, According to the Post's report, quote you discovered money. The area around Ponzi's Boston office was still swarmed with people trying to get their money back. The Department of Justice got involved in the investigation, with past podcast subject Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer getting personally involved. The Boston News Bureau revealed that the entire previous year's sale of postal coupons had totaled less than sixty thou dollars. At one point. During all of this, Ponzi disappeared for several hours leading people to wonder if he had fled. Then, on August eleven, the Boston Post printed an article under the headline Canadian pons served jail term. Montreal Police jail warden and others declare that Charles Ponzy of Boston and Charles Palmsy of Montreal, who was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for forgery on Italian bank, are one and same man. The next day, Ponzi was arrested and admitted his previous forgery conviction and that he didn't have the money to repay all these investors. Four officers of the old Colony Foreign Exchange Company, which was that competitor across the way with the Ballyhu man, They were all arrested at about the same time as well. Soon Ponzi's time in federal prison in Atlanta was public knowledge as well, and his so called business had collapsed, with auditors concluding that there was no overseas investment in reply coupons. Although the word scheme had been used in a lot of reporting, many newspapers were describing what was happening as a bubble. The Boston Globe printed up a list of other big bubble collapses, including the South Sea and Mississippi bubble collapses that we talked about on the show recently, and the fraud carried out by past podcast subject Cassie chab Wick. Thousands of people lost their money due to Ponzi scheme, and the Hanover Trust Bank collapsed. Throughout all of this, Rose stood by her husband. She told reporters that she loved him and would support him, and then along the way during all this, Charles learned that she had known about his prior criminal history for their entire marriage and had never said anything about it. Charles Ponzi was charged with eighty six counts of mail fraud. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in federal prison. His incarceration started on December twelfth, nineteen twenty, and he was paroled after forty months. In nineteen twenty one, While Ponzi was incarcerated, the Boston Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Quote for its exposure of the operations of Charles Ponzi by a series of articles which finally led to his arrest. During those months of reporting, the Post had listed Edwin A. Grozier as a publisher and editor of the paper, but Edwin was actually unwell. His son, Richard had largely taken his place and had reported most of this story. Edwin insisted that Richard had been running the newspaper this whole time, and that he deserved all the credit for the Pulitzer. William McMasters claimed that Ponzi still owed him money for his pr work and sued him for a little over four thousand dollars. From prison, Ponzi filed a suit of his own, claiming that Masters owed him money for being paid to place advertisements that never ran. Ponzi won both of those suits. As Ponzi served his sentence on these federal fraud charges, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts tried to press charges of its own, although Ponzi's lawyers argued that this was double jeopardy. He was again tried, convicted, in this time sentence to seven to nine years in prison. While out on bail during an appeal, ponz went to Florida and sold a bunch of people what he claimed was prime Florida real estate but was really swampland. He was found guilty of fraud in that scheme and sentenced to a year of hard labor at Florida State Prison while out on bail appealing that conviction. He attempted to flee by boat, but he was caught, arrested, and sent back to Massachusetts to serve his sentence there. He was released from prison in nineteen thirty four and deported back to Italy on October seven of that year. There's various brief write ups of this that make it kind of sound like authorities suddenly realized that he had never become a citizen, but like that had been part of the reporting of the whole initial crime. So I think it was more that they were just like, all right, time to be done. They may have realized that that was a fast way to end their efforts in the matter. There was talk of Rose joining Charles in Italy after he was deported, sort of with the idea that once he got himself set up there, she might come, but has never happened, and they ultimately divorced in nineteen thirty six. They kept writing to one another after their divorce, though even after all of that, she seems to have genuinely loved him and thought the best of him. She got a job keeping the books at the Coconut Grove nightclub, which burned down in a horrific and deadly fire in ninety two. She was not there when that happened because she had gone home early that day. She remarried in nineteen fifty six and died in at the age of Details are contradictory about the last year's of Ponzi's life. It's possible that he worked for an Italian airline and that was how he made his way to Brazil, which is where he spent the end of his life. He died in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro on January eighth, ninety nine, was only enough money to pay for his own burial expenses. Although this kind of fraud is synonymous with Ponzi's name today, he was not the first or only person to pretend to invest people's money but really just pay the earlier investors out of money that was brought in from new marks. It's been described as robbing Peter to pay Paul, which is a phrase that has roots as far back as the fifteenth century. Documented schemes like this that pre date Ponzi include one that was carried out by Sarah Howe, who opened the Ladies Deposit Bank in Boston in eighteen seventy nine. She was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned multiple times as she ran this same scheme in multiple cities. She would get out of prison and go somewhere else and do it over again. William Miller, who was known as five Miller because of the massive returns that he promised, launched the Franklin Syndicate in Brooklyn in eight nine. This was the same basic schemes what Ponsi was doing, and newspapers actually got quotes from him during their reporting on Ponzi. Sometimes the term Ponzi scheme is also used interchangeably with pyramid scheme, although that term can also have slightly different nuance. Both of these schemes involved bringing in more and more investors, but a pyramid scheme typically has more of a hierarchy, with layers of investors below the person or people at the top, who are usually the only ones making money. Ponzi's scheme made enormous headlines when it happened, but it really wasn't until after the Great Depression that federal regulators in the US really took steps to try to prevent this kind of scam. But that was also part of regulations meant to try to prevent another catastrophe like the depression. The Securities Exchange Commission was established in nineteen thirty four, and newly passed laws required most businesses and individuals who were selling securities to register with the SEC and to abide by newly created regulations. And then the Investment Advisors Act of nineteen forty and Investment Company Act of nineteen forty similarly require most companies that are advising people about the purchasing of securities to register with sec also to follow various regulations about doing so. That has not stopped ponzi schemes entirely, though not in the US or in the rest of the world. For example, ponzi schemes became a massive problem in Albania in the nineteen nineties, with as much as two thirds of the population investing in them, leading to rioting when those schemes collapsed. And of course there was Bernie made Off, who ran what is described as the largest ponzi scheme in history, estimated at almost sixty five billion dollars, which was discovered in two thousand eight. Uh, there's still a lot of ways that people are able to defraud other people. As a random side note, Ponzi's mansion in Lexington, Massachusetts that he bought for thirty nine thousand dollars. That's still there. It last sold in one for three point five million dollars. Ponzi. Uh, do you have a listener mail? I do have listener mail. Um. We have started to get lots of listener mail about our episode about rabies. Uh. This is one of the rabies emails. And I love the title because the title is my own bat rabies story from a veterinarian. Don't worry, it is not a bad story. Um. So Liz wrote, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I was so excited when I saw you guys did an episode on rabies. I'm a small animal veterinarian, and of course I give thousands of rabies vaccinations a year. I'm excited to hear Holly's bat rabies story on Friday. But I have my own. About three years ago, my husband was out of town and my three year old daughter was sleeping in bed with me. We were woken up in the middle of the night by one of my cats leaping across the room. I turned on the light to a bat lying around my room. I moved my daughter out of the room and called to my dad, who lives with us. As I checked on my daughter and my son, who was asleep in another room, my dad, unbeknownst to me, let the bat out of the window, and it's not widely known, So hopefully you will tell your listeners about this part. If a person is asleep, we're too young to accurately tell you. If they were bitten, and we're in the same room as about, it's considered an exposure. This is because bat bites can be so small they do not draw blood or leave a visible mark. You can be sleeping and not even know you have been bitten. Because my dad let the bat out, it could not be tested, so my two small children had to go through rabies exposure shots. Since I'm a veterinarian, I'm vaccinated, so I just got a booster. I was very lucky that my pediatrician knew about this and knew the protocols needed. I cannot say the same for the e er physicians, who unfortunately were not up to date on their rabies protocols. My kids are older now and do not even remember the series of shots they got, but it gives me a great personal story to tell my clients who don't understand why they're dogs and cats still need rabies vaccinations if they are mainly inside animals. I've included several pictures of my zoo to pay my pet tax. I currently have four cats. I'm not gonna list off all of their names because this is quite a lot of animals. I currently have four cats, four dogs, three horses, and a guinea pig. Uh. There is a theme to all of those names. I did not read them all, but they all they all. They all have alcohol related names, which I find very lovely. Uh. Liz, ps, I have a suggestion that is hopefully on your list of topics for the future, the Libby Prison breaker. Just Libby Prison. This is a close personal topics since my four times great grandfather was one of the escaped prisoners and even wrote a book that I have a reprinted copy. Uh. So, thank you list so much for this email. It's so funny to me. As we got this email on Tuesday, May the tenth. The Rabies episode came out Monday May the ninth, Wednesday, May the eleven, the episode that included the Libby prison break. Uh and then, of course the Friday episode that UH talked more about rabies, exposures and things that also was not out yet. When Liz send this email, thank you so much, Liz, um, I feel like we made the point somewhere that, yeah, bat bites can be so small that it can be hard to know if you were personally bitten. Way back, forever ago, there was an episode of the podcast Judge John Hodgment about these brothers that were living in a house that they had gotten for some ridiculously small amount of money through like a tax sale or in a state so something like that, and it was infested with bats and their method of dealing with the bats was not a safe method, and John Hodgeman was like, seriously, you have got to do something about these bats, because if they're in your house while you're asleep and you get bitten by when you will not necessarily know. Um so I did not know that that that means that if you're sleeping and there's a bat in the room, that that that can count as an exposure. But yes, yeah, this is one of the reasons why bats are great. Leave them alone, do not mess with UH. 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