The founder of most famous Russian Ponzi scheme MMM, Sergey Mavrodi, claims in an interview to FT Alphaville that he is responsible for the recent uprise of bitcoin price.

Mavrodi said that one of his MMM financial schemes, the international structure MMM Global (Bitcoin Republic), which is popular in China, operates solely in bitcoin and has driven large volumes of the cryptocurrency. The reason for using bitcoin is its cheapness and convenience:

“In MMM Global (Bitcoin Republic) only Bitcoin is used, for the structure is international, and international banking payments are expensive and complicated for ordinary members,” Mavrodi said.

Apparently, Mr Mavrodi thinks very high of his enterprise and claims that it can influence dramatically the bitcoin economy. It seems obvious to him that without his scheme the price of bitcoin would collapse:

“If I refuse using Bitcoin tomorrow, it will fall down. You can have a look at the daily happiness letters on the website to estimate the volumes,” Mavrodi said.

The “letters about getting help” are testimonials of happy users published on the website. It gives the total number of over 138 mln participants in 107 countries. The promised income is 100% per month.

Mavrodi refuses to call MMM Global a financial pyramid. Participants' money are not accumulated on one account, and members transfer money to each other directly without any intermediaries, he explained. Chinese banks are involved in the transfers processing them as ordinary private transactions without knowing that they belong to MMM participants.

In 1989-1995 Mavrodi operated the MMM scheme in Russia with approximately 10-15 mln participants. He was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for financial fraud by Russian authorities in 2007. Since then he launched new projects MMM-2011 and MMM-2012. In August 2015 Mavrodi reportedly launched the MMM pyramid in South Africa.

Sonya Belova