BREAKING: MMM founder Sergey Mavrodi dies of heart attack In Russia

Sergey Mavrodi, the founder of MMM, a Russian company that perpetrated one of the world’s largest Ponzi schemes of all time, is dead.

According to a report by Moskovsky Komsomolets, the founder of the MMM series of financial pyramid schemes, Mavrodi, died in Moscow at the age of 62.

WunderGist gathered that Mavrodi was taken to a city hospital from a bus stop overnight Monday, March 26, after he felt weakness and pain in the chest area.

“The emergency team has failed to save his life. He died this morning,” the report said.

The preliminary cause of death is a heart attack.

Sergei Mavrodi created the company “MMM” in 1992. It quickly gained popularity and became the largest financial pyramid in the history of Russia. The income of the members who joined it was paid out of the contributions of new arrivals, and when the flow of customers ceased to grow, non-payments began.

According to various estimates, the number of victims of the MMM has reached 10-15 million people.

In 1994, Mavrodi became a member of the Russian parliament. Then he announced that he was giving up his privileges: salaries and cars. Mavrodi stressed that he became a deputy only for the sake of immunity.

Two years later, before the presidential elections in 1996, he was stripped of his mandate.

In 2007, Mavrodi was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for defrauding 10,000 investors out of 110 million rubles ($4.3 million). All this time he left during the preliminary detention while the investigation was conducted.

Mavrodi claimed he is not the beneficiary of the donations and he is not used to flamboyant lifestyle.

His true charges of which he was later convicted of is tax fraud though he claimed that MMM scheme is not a business, but a mutual donation program of which there is no law against such.

In 2016, he announced the creation of his own crypto currency – Mavro. In the first month, 33,000 people took part in the project.

MMM stands for the first letters of the founders’ surnames – Sergei Mavrodi, Olga Melnikova and Vyacheslav Mavrodi.

However, some people believe that it stands for Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox. The company got a lot of money from people – it was making about 50 million USD each day.

MMM started as a company that imported office equipment. However, there were some problems. In January 1992 the company was accused of tax evasion. This led to problems with the financial support of company’s operation. It struggled.

But how did MMM achieve that? The company promised annual returns for up to 1000% to private investors. It sounded quite attractive, and a lot of people were eager to invest. With strong advertising and naive people (no one heard about scams during that time), MMM became one of the most successful companies in Russia.

However, the success didn’t last for long. Eventually, the company was shut down in 1994 and it declared bankruptcy in 1997. Unfortunately, everything didn’t end there. After 14 years, the company reopened as “MMM Global.”