So I’d recently watched a documentary on Madoff, and it left me wondering - what’s a Ponzi scheme called thereabouts, and do they have any scams named after a person? I don’t think Earthlings have any scams named after a person other than the Ponzi scheme, or at least I couldn’t find any after taking a gander through Wikipedia.
Offhand, without actually looking things up: I suspect that a Ponzi scheme would break down into a lot of unfulfilled contracts plus a pinch of hubris, with the proportions depending on the exact setup of the scheme and on what the participants are actually told when signing up for the scheme contract.
(Some simple pyramid schemes would be fully on the hubris side and thus plausibly legal under Imperial law, though impractical due to relative lack of sufficiently incompetent participants. Then again I’m not sure if those would be illegal on Earth either.)
I think I’ve seen a canonical(ish) description of a financial pyramid scam somewhere, but I don’t recall where it could be. I suspect it would have a technical name rather than an eponymous one.
…actually, having checked the post on leonine contracts and illusory promises, I now believe the category of Ponzi-scheme-like scams that classify as hubris-on-behalf-of-participants rather than something actually illegal would in fact include quite a lot of less simple schemes, with the caveat that 1) the perpetrator would need to make no specific promises that aren’t going to pan out, or they’re going to be liable for breach of contract, and 2) it would be such a black stain on the perpetrator’s reputation that the money gained [if any, see above under “sufficiently incompetent participants”] would not necessarily be worth the rest of the resulting problems.
(Possible vague OTL analogy: MMM-2011, which started out with the founder going “yes I know it’s a pyramid scheme, yes I’m the guy who did a big one in the 1990s, just try it, OK?” Enough people did try to be worth it initially, though apparently he did end up going into the broken-promises direction later.)
They almost certainly do. In fact, given the taxonomizing habits, I’m pretty certain Eldraeic includes as remarkable and colorful a taxonomy of grifts as the characters from Leverage, at least some of which are real references.
Don’t think I’ve had any occasion to create 'verse names for them yet, though.