S7E2 - The Original Con: How Charles Ponzi Invented Modern Fraud - Part 2: The Crowd and the Promise

The office on School Street did something more dangerous than hold money. It turned hope into a line. Charles Ponzi’s pitch was simple enough to repeat and strange enough to sound intelligent.He said he had found an imbalance in international postal exchange. He said the returns were extraordinary because the opportunity was rare. And in Boston, in the summer of nineteen twenty, rare sounded profitable. Ponzi was not selling a spreadsheet. He was selling certainty. He told depositors, directly and through intermediaries, that money could grow fast because he had found a technical edge no one else had no...