"17 KAMAZ trucks of cash were secretly taken out during the arrest": 10 facts about MMM

On August 11, 1955, Sergey Mavrodi, the infamous founder of financial pyramids, was born. His most famous brainchild was "MMM" — the classic and largest in the history of Russia in terms of the number of victims (10-15 million people) and damage (according to some estimates, 3 billion rubles).

1. Now it is customary to decipher the abbreviation MMM as "We Can Do a Lot." But initially these three letters meant only the first letters of the founders' surnames (Sergey Mavrodi himself, his brother Vyacheslav Mavrodi, as well as Olga Melnikova).

2. Although formally MMM tickets were not securities, they had all the necessary degrees of protection (watermarks, etc.) and were printed at the same factories as American dollars.

3. At first Mavrodi was not going to print any tickets at all, but just paint the dollars red.

4. The cost of MMM tickets and promotions was set personally by Mavrodi. The purchase and sale prices changed twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. These prices were printed in almost all newspapers, announced on the radio and on TV (as advertising). Usually they only grew (the approximate growth rate was 100% per month).

5. For six months of work (until August 4, 1994 — the date of Mavrodi's arrest), prices increased 127 times, and the number of depositors of the company, according to various sources, reached from 10 to 15 million people. The money did not have time to count, and they were counted by eye, rooms. According to various estimates, Mavrodi earned about $50 million a day in Moscow alone at that time.

6. On August 4, 1994, employees of the Moscow Department of Tax Inspection, with the help of riot police, stormed the central office of the MMM on the Warsaw Highway. All financial documentation and accounts of the company were seized. There were witnesses who claimed (and confirmed it at the trial under oath) that seventeen KAMAZ trucks took out all the cash from the back door of the office.

7. In 1996, Mavrodi put forward his candidacy for the post of president of Russia, but the CEC rejected almost all the signatures submitted by him.

Russian Russian House of Selenga, Vlastilina, Telemarket, Hermes-Finance, Tibet, Russian Real Estate, Rosich, Regional Pension Fund " 8. The success of MMM caused the appearance of about 1,700 other financial pyramids, in particular, such as "Hopper-Invest", "Russian House of Selenga", "Vlastilina", "Telemarket", "Hermes-Finance", "Tibet", "Russian Real Estate", "Rosich"North", etc.

9. The main character of MMM commercials, Lenya Golubkov, became the "Man of the Year" in 1994, and was ahead of Russian President Boris Yeltsin by as many as ten points in this rating.

10. In 1992, MMM made travel in the Moscow Metro free for one day several times.