Sergey Mavrodi in the early 90s founded "MMM" - one of the first financial pyramids in Russia, which defrauded about 15 million of its depositors. Despite the trial and serving a prison term, the swindler managed to revive his brainchild.
Mavrodi's organization, named MMM-2011, issued virtual securities called MAVRO. Their quotes were changed by order of the head of the organization. According to Mavrodi, the abbreviation “MMM” means “We can do a lot,” and the system itself is a mutual aid fund. Through the purchase of MAVRO, people deposit money into the general account of the organization, and then they can return their investments with a profit of up to 360% per annum. The structure of the organization, as before, was built according to the principle of a pyramid - payments to depositors are made at the expense of financial investments of newly joined participants. Oddly enough, despite the history of MMM's activity in the last decade, the company began to develop actively.
On May 28, 2012 "MMM-2011" collapsed. First, employees of the organization announced the suspension of payments on deposits. Then there was information about the closure of offices, bank accounts and the export of all cash. Ordinary participants of "MMM" could not contact its administrators.
Even before that, in March 2012, Sergei Mavrodi was arrested due to non-payment of an administrative fine, but due to complaints about his health condition, he was hospitalized. In the midst of the scandal with the collapse of "MMM-2011", he escaped from the hospital, after which he made himself known via the Internet. Mavrodi in his blog admitted the stop of payments, but said that this is only a temporary phenomenon due to technical problems. And a little later he said that due to too much panic among depositors, the development of MMM-2011 is impossible, and therefore, to support it, he opens MMM-2012, which continues to function to this day. And since the crash of MMM-2011, Sergei Mavrodi has plans to start a political career: recently a video appeared on the Internet in which he shares his plans to found a political party and enter the Verkhnaya Rada of Ukraine.
The Expert Council under the Federal Antimonopoly Service issued an official conclusion that MMM-2011 is a pyramid scheme. Based on this, in several regions of Russia and the CIS countries, criminal cases have been opened against the organizers of the pyramid on the fact of fraud. In light of what is happening, the Ministry of Finance is developing a project to introduce a new article to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - "organizing a financial pyramid", but Sergei Mavrodi believes that this will not entail any consequences for him.
