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Silly question here, why were the account books buried instead of burned? Do the books have any use in future if they never got caught?
Why even have records in paper?
Someone's checking their accounts add up, it just happens not to be the tax man.
You can't run a ponzi scheme without records the accounting skills needed to run one successfully are probably greater than the ones needed to manage an actual investment fund.
Actually, you don't need anything more than basic bookkeeping skills. What surprises me is that it is an online ponzi scheme and yet they maintain records on paper. This does not add up.
Again you don't run a ponzi scheme on that scale using "basic bookkeeping skills", you need to be a heck of an accountant to make sure that you have enough cash flow to pay out returns and make enough legitimate investments and constantly keep the money moving to make it appear that it's still there.

If you just base you ponzi scheme on I take 50% of every new payment and give out the previous 50% to my previous investments it won't really drag on for longer than couple of months, not to mention that you actually need to generate allot of financial traffic to both draw people in initially and keep the authorities of your back.

The reason ponzi schemes tend to snowball like this is because they run exceptionally well many of them have actually made some decent return on their investments (not anywhere near the actual percentage needed to balance out the "management costs" ofc) a good ponzi scheme is almost indistinguishable from a legitimate investment fund, they'll make tons of trades, constantly move money around and keep large cash flows on hand to make it look like all the money is still there, make regular payouts, and "silence" any panicked investor who wants to cash out early.

Those are usually not as hard as they sound.
I don't know defrauding 1000's of people for years while keeping everyone in the dark including most if not all of your employees and making yourself look like a functioning legitimate business as far as casual financial inspections go sounds pretty hard to me, at least as hard as running an actual investment fund.

Regulators probe the market constantly if your trades don't add up at all you'll get caught in a minute lasting years and managing to steal 100's of millions or even billions of dollars doesn't seem something anyone could just pull off, I think you underestimate the intelligence and skills required to run these sort of scams.

The Chinese government is not a great adversary to have, though.
Paper records aren't subject to remote access exploits by police or hackers. If you're running an illegal scheme in a surveillance state, it starts to seem like a reasonable decision.
That's a horrible site on mobile... it tries to do some weird app loading thing, wants to consume additional local storage while a percentage counter slowly climbs one percent per second with no content visible.

Better link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-3425972/China-co...

First time I've ever seen Daily Mail cited as 'better link'
Yeah, I know... but in this case it's almost infinitely better. There were others but Daily Mail had a few more images included in the article, and since the content is from Associated Press anyways I didn't think people would mind. However, my comment stands at -3 so lesson learned: everyone hates the Daily Mail site. :)
Social Security is up to $1.3 trillion per year, so $7.6 billion isn't quite the record for a Ponzi scheme.
What do you expect? It's China.
The China's own ponzi economy will be mirroring the collapse of Ezubo .

"So in two short decades, China has erected a monumental Ponzi economy that is economically rotten to the core. It has 1.5 billion tons of steel capacity, but “sell-through” demand of less than half that amount.... The same is true for its cement industry, ship-building, solar and aluminum industries—to say nothing of 70 million empty luxury apartments and vast stretches of over-built highways, fast rail, airports, shopping mails and new cities.

In short, the flip-side of the China’s giant credit bubble is the most massive malinvesment of real economic resources—-labor, raw materials and capital goods—ever known"

China’s Monumental Ponzi: Here’s How It Unravels http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/chinas-monumental-ponz...

Anything for more GDP growth! I wonder if the insane over-provisioning is a genius scheme to monopolise worldwide manufacturing for a century (even at massive cost to their population) or just a drive to keep up unsustainable growth statistics. Either way the game will be up eventually...
There are many serious issue in China's economy. Unfortunately, there are no feasible way to avoid them considering the hyper-growth in 30 years. If you have thoughts and ideas, please share. Call it "Monumental Ponzi"? I suggest you to do two things. One, do some serious study in economics and live and do business in China for a couple of years to see what it really is, if you can afford it. Or continue shedding your eyes from the world and being delusional.
That guy looks like a kook. Not that everything's on the up-and-up in China but I bet this guy spent 2008-2012 exhorting everyone to buy gold.
There are many serious issues in China's economy. Unfortunately, there are no feasible way to avoid them considering the hyper-growth in 30 years, as far as we as a society know. If you have thoughts and ideas, please share. Call it "Monumental Ponzi"? I suggest you to do one of two things. Either do some serious study in economics and live and do business in China for a couple of years to see what it really is, if you can afford it. Or continue shedding your eyes from the world and being delusional.
I suggest you to do one of two things. Either refute the 'ponzi' argument, or keep attacking me personally :) You seem to have some anger in your life. you should resolve that first.
That's not a Ponzi scheme; that really doesn't have anything to do with Ponzi schemes, I wonder why you even bring it up?
To shit on China? It's de rigueur these days...
Chinese people have amassed a lot of wealth but their investment options are very limited. Hence the Chinese stock market bubble, property-building bubble and Ponzi schemes.
I think the problem is, there simply is no venue for them to invest in. Real estate and the stock market, as you mentioned. The only other places would be commodities, which are tanking.....due to demand falling off in China.

What do you do when there is nowhere to invest your excess funds? (not rhetorical) You either invest in riskier asset classes, or you don't need to generate as much income (work less perhaps?)

How can one China Ponzi sheme have $7.5 billion, but the the best ponzi sheme to date, bitcoin, market cap only stands at like $5 billiion?
Bernie Madoff stole $18 billion in his ponzi scheme.