The debacle with crypto currency is the financial scandal of the moment, something akin to a Ponzi scheme.
In light of that I thought Sun Chronicle readers might like to know there was a classic Ponzi right here in the Attleboros in the 1970s. There were two perpetrators and numerous victims who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars only to discover they had put themselves in financial jeopardy.
Such scams are not rare, but a true Ponzi is, well, breathtaking. Once it is exposed the investors kick themselves and other people ask how could they have been so dumb.
I know of this because former Opinion Page editor Mark Flanagan and I covered the story.
I am not going to name the perpetrators. My main purpose in writing is to warn people about falling for scams.
I also don’t know what ultimately happened to the people involved — the scammers and the scammed — and figure they deserve some privacy 45 years after the fact.
The information came from government and legal sources, all on the record. This was not an undercover newspaper investigation based on anonymous sources. It was reporting of events that were the result of a victim’s complaint to government authorities which took formal action.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal agency, announced in 1977 that a complaint had been…
