China’s ‘Bernie Madoff’ jailed for life for huge fundraising fraud
Ding Ning was the head of Ezubao, a fraudulent online finance firm that duped investors out of more than US$7.7 billion, according to state media reports
The ringleader of China’s biggest Ponzi scheme was sentenced to life in prison by a Beijing court on Tuesday, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Ding Ning, dubbed by the media as China’s Bernie Madoff after the Wall Street con man, was convicted of fraudulent fundraising, smuggling precious metals, illegally possessing guns and crossing national borders, the report said.
Ding, 35, was the head of Ezubao, a peer-to-peer online financing firm. He fleeced more than 50 billion yuan (US$7.7 billion) from about 900,000 investors across the country with fabricated projects and returns from June 2014 to December 2015 when the scheme was busted by police, according to earlier state media reports.
Ezubao was the biggest Ponzi scheme ever broken up China in terms of the amount of money involved. The case exposed the financial and social risks which similar programmes posed as they mushroomed across the country amid lax regulation.
The amount of money involved in Ding’s Ponzi scheme was smaller than Madoff’s US$64.8 billion, but the Chinese scam had a far bigger client base of investors compared to the 4,800 clients in the US case.