English: Mug shot of Charles Ponzi (March 3, 1882 – January 18, 1949). Charles Ponzi was born in Italy and became known as a swindler for his money scheme. His aliases include Charles Ponei, Charles P. Bianchi, Carl and Carlo. Italiano: Foto segnaletica di Charles Ponzi. Charles Ponzi (Lugo, 3 marzo 1882 – Rio de Janeiro, 18 gennaio 1949) è stato un truffatore italiano. Immigrò negli Stati Uniti, dove divenne uno dei più grandi truffatori della storia americana. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that usually involves the payment of supposed returns to existing investors from money contributed by new investors. Ponzi scheme organisers often solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities that are claimed to generate high returns with little or no risk. In many Ponzi schemes that have been reported, the fraudsters focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors to create the false appearance that investors are profiting from a legitimate business.
However, with little or no legitimate earnings, Ponzi schemes require a consistent flow of money from new investors to continue and the schemes tend to collapse when it becomes difficult to recruit new investors or when a large number of investors ask to cash out and the fraudster has spent most of the money.
Ponzis chemes are named after Charles Ponzi, who conned thousands of people into investing in a postage stamp speculation scheme back in the 1920s. At a time when the annual interest rate for bank accounts was five percent, Charles Ponzi promised investors that he could provide a 50% return in just 90 days. Ponzi initially bought a small number of international mail coupons in support of his scheme, but quickly switched to using incoming funds from new investors to pay purported returns to earlier investors.
Nowadays a lot of Ponzi schemes revolve around overseas property investment due to the fact that it is difficult to see evidence of the actually investment from 1000’s of miles away, and many fraudsters either use generic buildings belonging to someone else or artists impressions of soon to be built resorts and hotels in their literature and/or websites.
Even though EcoHouse Group are an award winning global property developer many people are still cautious when they hear that our developments are thousands of miles away in Brazil and the word ecohouse ponzi has been thrown around on a few occasions, although mainly by rival companies or the fraudsters themselves keen to steer potential investors toward their own dodgy scheme.
It’s is for this reason that EcoHouse Group is committed to being totally transparent about their business and investment, we post regular construction updates to our websites and social media pages, have ‘press days’ where local press can come to our developments and see the construction work form themselves and taken photos for their publications, We even hold investor trips when we fly some of our top investors out to our development in Brazil.
In Summary, Even though we are not fond of the terms ‘ecohouse ponzi‘ or ‘ecohouse scam‘, we do know that they will sometimes be put out there, innocently or maliciously and rather than ignore it we welcome any investor or potential investor to speak to us and see for themselves why EcoHouse Group are all set to be one of the largest property developers in brazil and may even the world in years to come.
The Watchful Investor 