Introducing the Chinese Social Financial Network

You don’t even know what the thing is yet. How big it can get, how far it can go. This is no time to take your chips down. A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool?

A billion dollars.

And you know what’s even cooler than that? A trillion dollars via MMM, the Chinese Social Financial Network:

Move aside Mark Zuckerberg and your “like” economy. MMM, the brainchild of former Russian statesman and felon Sergey Mavrodi — he who does not want you to be a slave of the economic system — is the mutual aid social network unicorn of our time.

The alchemy works in the traditional style of a pyramid: taking funds from the money boxes of savers and redistributing them to those who have more pressing consumption needs today, mostly by convincing the former that investing in unconditional spending isn’t charity, but rather a 30 per cent per month return-generating enterprise.

The added genius of this scheme — as opposed to say Madoff’s — is that it’s entirely transparent about what it is from the onset. (You know, like bitcoin.) People have a right to throw their money away if they want to, and Mavrodi knows it.

As Quartz reported back in 2013:

In the early 1990s, he established a financial pyramid scheme in Russia under the MMM name. In 1994, he was arrested for tax evasion, and MMM found itself unable to repay depositors. The following year, Mavrodi was elected to Russia’s parliament on the promise that he would repay investors with government funds. His parliamentary immunity was soon revoked, and he was eventually arrested again in 2003, serving a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

But who sticks to Russian babushkas when there’s a much bigger, hungrier and more speculative minded market just around the corner?

For Mavrodi that has been China, where his scheme is now going absolutely viral.

For added ponzification value, it’s now also being tied to bitcoin, whereas it used to operate exclusively in Mavrodi’s own virtual currency the Mavros.

As a consequence Bitcoin’s value is up 97 per cent in 30 days, and still charging ahead, mostly on the back of Chinese exchange volume and premiums.

(Yes, Bloomberg, this is why ‘Bitcoin is still on a gigantic tear.’)

With fundamentals like “transferred funds to other participants are your help given by your own good will to another one, absolutely gratis” what really can go wrong?

Also, whoever said you needed to be slick when marketing financial products online? Here’s how Mavrodi likes to pitch the crowd.

Did we mention you get further percentage points if you upload your own testimonial to Youtube?

Related links:
Uber but for countries – FT Alphaville