The Ponzi Papers Part III: The scheme laid out in full

Part I
Part II

You’re likely wondering where all this is headed, so I will tell you.

Just because I uncovered these things in dribs and drabs and confusion doesn’t mean you need to, so let’s shine some light in this rabbit hole.

If you stick around, you won’t get concrete proof: there is no smoking gun, no four-part interview where the masterminds of this scheme explained everything out of hubris. Our evidence will often be circumstantial, and it will take many forms.

Explaining why will take a while, but this is what I believe. This is the only framework I found that made sense of what I’ve seen, and I am confident that I can convince you of the same:

• Several famous household names have built their careers off of Ponzi schemes, going back at least to the 1980s.
• They saw the potential for decentralized networks and digital currency as future technological advances that would allow them to replicate and grow their schemes in new ways.
• As the internet blossomed, replication was possible on an entirely new level. Extremely successful, extremely well-known tech companies were established in explicit support of this new network of Ponzi schemes through digital currency expansion, data harvesting, and the monopolization of online communication networks. Schemes that used to be the stuff of seedy families out of Dallas could now be reproduced around the world.
• Multiple universities served as research hubs in direct service of these schemes, developing real and fake technology for them, but also crafting PR strategies and developing legal arguments around banking and patents to support them.
• This international group of Ponzi schemers created Bitcoin with the express purpose of stealing money from investors. They developed three specific new technologies in the crypto space that allowed them to steal cryptocurrency assets, hide their digital footprints, and build a high-frequency trading network so they could shuttle those assets around the world in a dark global, liquidity pool. Jamie Dimon summed it up nicely when he called Bitcoin a “decentralized Ponzi scheme.”
• The replication of this scheme and investment in it has grown dramatically in the years this scheme has unfolded.
• Some well-known university and foundation global investment initiatives are poorly-hidden international money laundering fronts in service of this scheme.
• The entire cottage industry of “effective altruism” was created to justify the massive amounts of wealth that moves through these money laundering fronts, and to challenge any ethical qualms that the scheme’s growing list of investors had about it.
• The collective theft has been so large that it has literally caused global inflation, as countless people spend more than they have, unaware that the three trillion dollars they’ve invested in Ponzi schemes has already been stolen from them.
• Reputable media establishments have been purchased or created in order to shape public understanding to the scheme’s benefit. This is most obvious with Binance’s acquisition of Forbes, but extends well beyond it.
• The scheme has made notable inroads into our political systems, with co-conspirators in various parliaments, senates and executive offices. The role of two co-conspirators in particular raises serious questions about a U.S. Presidential election, (and I’m not talking about crypto titan mega-donors Sam Bankman-Fried and Peter Thiel).
• The run on Silicon Valley Bank was intentional and years in the making, conducted by several powerful VC firms who had been investing in the cryptocurrency scheme since the beginning. The scheme’s media tentacles had long positioned Bitcoin as a stable asset in tough economic times in service of this, which helped cause its dramatic rise following the bank run, discouraging victims from withdrawing funds and attracting more. The bank run also gave the schemers $2 billion through the movement of customers from Rippling to Brex, which was established for this purpose.  
• They did this knowing that one of their major fraudulent liquidity pools, Silvergate Bank, would go insolvent, as all Ponzi schemes do, hence the timing. There was a sudden resignation in service of this part of the scheme.
• Signature Bank, Credit Suisse and Bear Stearns all collapsed for similar reasons as Silvergate: all serving as slush funds for this growing network of Ponzi schemes.
• Critical to keeping the growing scheme from being exposed was a child sex blackmail network, developed and perfected by Jeffrey Epstein, just as he was trained to do at the Dalton School. This network lives on in his absence, in part through documents hidden on snooker websites.

I’ve painted this as a wretched and villainous affair so far. It certainly is, but there is another lens worth viewing it through:

This is the story of a bunch of prep school kids and nepo babies who realized they could play god a long time ago, blackmailing each other into complicity while they did crimes and stole money for decades, and then just kept on doing it until they stole trillions of dollars and crippled the world economy. It isn't a great endgame strategy: You might think the tech billionaires have cryogenic freezing technology and bunkers on Mars coming, but those are mostly just Ponzi schemes too, it turns out. This is the stupidest criminal enterprise in human history.

They invested billions and billions of dollars, leveraging some of the world’s most powerful research institutions, writing new laws, building machinery around the world. They funneled the country’s smartest rich kids right into it, for nothing, for a sham, for an old-timey grift; all so they could be VIPs at Coachella and dick around on yachts.

They destroyed newspapers, sabotaged education systems and invented conspiracy theories so we wouldn’t find out their whole careers were frauds and maybe they sexually abused children. It’s Anna Delvey becoming hundreds of the most important people on the planet. It’s a goddamn Vonnegut novel.  

So. Back to the rabbit hole?

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We’ll learn quite a bit more about Ponzi schemes later on, but for now we’ll cover the very basics: In a Ponzi scheme, the scammer raises money from investors by telling them about some investment, but they don’t actually invest it in that thing; they just pocket the money instead.

Here’s a standard example, it turns out: I’ve got some drilling rights on land in West Texas you’ll never see, but I tell you all about the fancy mapping software we’re using and the trustworthy businessmen saying the industry is booming and you give me some money. I might stage some drilling, or do just enough to make the operation seem believable, but the majority of the work never happens, your money gets funneled elsewhere, and one day the penny stock you bought into goes to zero.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s a bunch of stuff you probably didn’t know about famous billionaire Richard Branson, the most public investor in that fraudulent-looking company Clinkle.

If you don’t know Branson at all, you’ll get a fair introduction in this 1998 interview on Conan in which he appears to immediately sexually assault Salma Hayek; makes her give him a massage; repeatedly grabs her; jokes about having sex with her on his airplanes and throwing her out of a hot air balloon, making all parties deeply uncomfortable. At best he’s an absolute creep. (This is the only Branson interview I’ve watched, but I suspect he tips his hand as a monster in many of them)

He gets an extra cheeky grin when he talks about how his international modeling agency (which he calls “Virgin Girls”) famously recruited Kate Moss in an airport when she was 14 years old.

He was a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, showing up in his little black book.

The cult NXIVM hosted multiple events on his private Caribbean island.

His various corporate and personal holdings mainly exist in Caribbean shell companies.

In 1971, he was convicted of tax evasion. He had developed a scheme to avoid paying British taxes on his record sales by first taking them across the border and then sneaking them back to sell domestically.

While his Virgin Group conglomerate is best known for airlines, music and space travel (and cell phones and credit cards and…), he’s had more than a few suspicious business ventures:

• Virgin Orbit promised space tourism, being valued at over $3.7 billion. The rockets made six flights over three years (four of them successful), before laying off 85% of their staff and suspending operations two weeks ago. Ponzi schemes sound like this.
• Virgin Nigeria was a joint venture between Virgin Group and Nigerian investors. Five years after forming, they suspended all flights to London and Johannesburg (both popular flights out of Nigeria, one would assume). Virgin said they were looking to sell, and took “Virgin” off the name, but kept their 49% stake. In 2012, they fired all their staff “for being disloyal” and ceased all local, regional and international operations. Ponzi schemes sound like this.
• Branson predicted Virgin Cars  would sell 24,000 cars in its first year, but it only sold half that three years later. Two years after that, it ceased all operations. Ponzi schemes sound like this.
• Virgin Hyperloop raised $400 million to develop vacuum trains. Last year, they abandoned plans for human rated travel and fired half their workforce. Ponzi schemes sound like this.
• Virgin Oceanic was billed is an undersea leisure adventure to the deepest part of the ocean. This service never came to fruition and the project was put on hold indefinitely. Ponzi schemes sound like this.
• Virgin Cola suffered some wild misfortune when a Coca-Cola executive assembled SWAT teams to fly to the UK with briefcases full of money to pay retailers to get Virgin Cola off the shelves. This Coke executive later became the manager of Virgin Group’s bank accounts. This sounds like they intentionally tanked their own company, which is something Ponzi schemes often do to justify the disappearance of funds.
• Virgin Vie was a makeup company that employed over 7,000 consultants, and received an Innovation and Excellence award Direct Selling Association. Ten million dollars of Virgin Vie’s revenue went right back to Virgin Group to take “Virgin” off the name. They discontinued several lines, liquidated, and owed over £5 million that most creditors would not receive. This one’s a switcheroo: pyramid schemes sound like this.
• Virgin Atlantic invested over £135 million in Virgin Connect though the website offered little more than an FAQ about future plans. In 2020, they ceased all operation. Money laundering fronts sound like this. Clinkle sounds like this too.   
• Virgin Money Australia was a credit card that partnered with WestPac bank. Bob Joss, the Stanford professor who wrote the highly suspicious offshore banking case study, was the CEO of WestPac at the time. This may have brought Branson and Joss together pre-Clinkle.

Note that this is just from browsing Wikipedia and is what immediately struck me as worth noting; it is likely that other Virgin tentacles sound like Ponzi schemes or other criminal enterprise as well.

I do wonder, for instance, why an unethical man who owns massive international shipping concerns would take such a strong interest in leniency for a heroin trafficker in Singapore.

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Now that we’ve spent some time in facts, would you indulge me on something a bit more speculative?

I wouldn’t dare suggest the architects of this scheme actually did reveal everything in an interview written in code out of unbelievable hubris, hidden on a website owned by a co-conspirator. That’s a bit too fanciful, even for this story.

Secret codes are a recipe for confirmation bias: sure, I could say that snooker means blackmail and poker means Ponzi scheme and Beevers means Branson, but why couldn’t I say snooker means money laundering and poker means The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Beevers means Josh Kushner, you know?

Still, part one’s snooker child protection policy was super weird, and this rabbit hole has taken me to some very strange places.

With that in mind, could you Google “The Unabridged Story of the Hendon Mob” and save all four parts? If reality lines up with this theory at its strangest, I suspect it won’t be available much longer.