Ponzi scheme
Britishnoun
Etymology
Origin of Ponzi scheme
After Charles Ponzi , who famously perpetrated such a scheme in the United States of America in the early 20th century
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
A former Pacific Palisades resident was found guilty by a federal jury in Orange County on Thursday of running a Ponzi scheme that stole nearly $2 million from investors in smart ring technology.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 27, 2026
Average return since the launch of Jawahar’s Ponzi scheme?
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 18, 2026
Instead, he simply used new clients’ money to pay earlier investors their “profits”—while keeping a significant portion for himself—a type of fraud that came to be known as a Ponzi scheme.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 10, 2026
The Madoff scandal, in which investors lost $17.5 billion in invested principal, operated like a typical Ponzi scheme with returns to older investors paid by money from new investors.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 5, 2026
They had the essential feature of a Ponzi scheme: To maintain the fiction that they were profitable enterprises, they needed more and more capital to create more and more subprime loans.
From "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
