Welcome to Boston Confidential, Bean Towns True Crime Podcast.

Boston is a great city, but there's more to it than the Freedom Trail in Fenway Park.

There's a startling underbelly to the city, and Boston Confidential will take you on a guided tour

of the hub of the universe, Boston, Massachusetts.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to Boston Confidential.

My name's Barry McGuire, and I'm your host.

I'm a 20-year private investigator on the streets of Boston,

and I help run a company called Impact Due Diligence

Investigations. If you need anything in terms of investigative services, feel free to contact

me at Impact. If I can't help you personally, I'll certainly direct you to the right person

or agency. All right, guys, let's get to it. We had a huge response to our Charles Ponzi episode

last week, and it was definitely an interesting story. I knew about the Ponzi scam a little bit.

It's basically the Rob Peter to pay Paul, right? You know, you pay new investments with old investments, and that's how it goes.

And it can continue until the new investment slows down. At that point, it just breaks down.

And that's what happened to Ponzi. Ponzi actually learned that scam at Banco Zarasi in Montreal, and he knew in order to have

this go for an extended period anyway that he'd have to have a high volume of incoming

investments.

And if he could maintain that, the scam would work.

But what I didn't know about Ponzi was this started as a legitimate business. And in my research on this, that's how most fraudsters begin, that this is a

legitimate effort to make money, but it just doesn't work, right? The actual business doesn't work. And the IRCs, basically

the stamps he was trying to engage in arbitrage on, there just wasn't enough of them. And there was

no way for the Treasury to process. There was no vehicle for the United States Treasury to convert that

...