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Cape Town - A Fin24 user, who wishes to remain anonymous, lost R35 000 between herself and her fiancé from the Ponzi scheme MMM after the account "froze" in April 2016.
This is her story as told via email:
Last year my fiancé and I "donated" about R35 000 between the two of us to MMM. When we did this, we were under the impression that government is aware and that it was completely above board.
We only wanted to have extra income for ourselves every month, besides our salaries. Then the system "froze" in April 2016 and "Mavros" stopped growing.
[When people 'donate' they accrue points called Mavros, the currency stemming from the Russian-created pyramid system.]
We weren’t exactly happy about this, but we were hopeful because we were promised that +-6 months later our monies would automatically be transferred into our bank accounts.
SO THE WAITING BEGAN
More than a year after the "System Freeze", nobody could honestly say they had received their "Old Mavros" back as promised, we began to realize that we had been conned and probably wouldn’t be getting the money back, because nobody could explain why we were still waiting, and MMM has about 3 Facebook pages where people interact.
If you even type the words "Old Mavros" in, insults would fly and you would just merely be told to recruit and donate again, this time via a new currency called “bitcoin” in order for "Old Mavros" to be paid out quicker.
[When people stopped donating and the points dried up last year, MMM simply froze the system and called the accrued points “Old Mavros”.]
And so we continued with life, hopeless and struggling financially because what we had thought would be our financial breakthrough, was in fact one big scam.
A week ago, I randomly logged into both our MMM accounts just to see if there was anything new, as I frequently did with both the Facebook pages and our MMM accounts.
I WAS SHOCKED! They were no longer going to pay back our "Old Mavros". NO! Now they were telling us that we needed to donate AGAIN in order for this to happen, and that we would only receive back 10% of what we put in as "Old Mavros"!
My fiancé and I were very shocked and angry because when we calculated the new process, it meant we needed to donate close to R350 000, in order to get our R35 000 back! That is ridiculous! We don’t even have a quarter of that money, our savings are gone!
I wish MMM people would stop trying to convince people to join and donate MMM, with a promise of financial freedom, because you will only lose your money. Iit’s hard to prosecute anyone or take anyone to task, because they call it a "community of donations" and "people helping each other". IT IS ONE BIG SCAM.
We will regret our decision for a long time coming still.
If only we knew better.
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