Celsius Wants Some Money Back
Also Bobby Jain, Bill Ackman, Vlad Artamonov and frozen heads.
The way a Ponzi scheme works, for a while, is that (1) you take people’s money, (2) you tell them that they are earning a nice return on their money and (3) if they want to withdraw their money, with those nice returns, you just give them someone else’s money. With enough investors, you can keep this going for a while: There’s plenty of money from new investors to pay off anyone who wants to withdraw, and because everyone who wants to withdraw gets their money back, no one suspects anything, so not too many people withdraw and the system works. Eventually it doesn’t.
One result of this is that some victims of Ponzi schemes do quite well for themselves: They invest in the Ponzi, they earn a nice return, and they withdraw their money before it all collapses. Most of the time, these people are not, like, in on the Ponzi; they just had lucky timing.