Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Just yesterday, in the course of documenting the largest ponzi scheme the world has ever known (in terms of number of victims), we remarked that if China’s beleaguered masses needed yet another excuse to rise up and stage massive street protests, they got one in the form of online P2P lender Ezubao, which defrauded nearly a million people.
Ezubao’s model wasn’t exactly complicated. Investors, they said, could earn between 9% and 15% by funding a variety of projects presented on the company’s website. When the money came in, management simply absconded with it all and attempted to repay old investors with new investors’ money.
34-year-old Ding Ning – the company’s founder – had a penchant for spending investors’ hard earned money on things like CNY12 million pink diamond rings. “Among gifts that Yucheng Chairman Ding Ning gave his president, Zhang Min, were a $20 million Singapore villa, a $1.8 million pink diamond ring, luxury limousines and watches and more than $83 million in cash,” Reuters recounts, before adding that “Zhang, the group president who was marketed as ‘the most beautiful executive in online finance’, said on state broadcaster CCTV that Ding asked her to buy up everything from every Louis Vuitton and Hermès store in China, “and go overseas to buy more if that wasn’t enough.”
(Ding Ning at an “undisclosed location”)
According to a highly amusing Google translation of a Xinhua story, Ding Ning and “several closely related groups of female executives, their private life extremely extravagant, spendthrift to suck money.”
Yes, “spendthrift to suck money” and if there was anything Ezubao was particularly adept at, it was “sucking money” – from 900,000 unsuspecting Chinese who staged protests in December following the government’s move to freeze the company’s assets.
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