Caritas was a Ponzi scheme in Romania that was active between April 1992 and August 1994. It attracted millions of depositors from all over the country, who invested more than a trillion old lei (between US$1 billion and $5 billion) before it finally went bankrupt on 14 August 1994, having a debt of US$450 million ($ in current terms).
History
The Caritas company, which organized the scheme, was founded by Ioan Stoica in April 1992 in Brașov as a limited liability company with just 100,000 lei (US$500, or $ in current terms) in capital. Caritas moved to Cluj-Napoca two months later. The deposits were initially small (2,000–10,000 lei), but later, the minimum initial deposit was 20,000 lei, while the maximum was 160,000 lei. At the beginning, only residents of Cluj were allowed to make a deposit, but starting summer 1993, all Romanian citizens were allowed to participate.
It labeled itself a "mutual-aid game" (hence the name "Caritas", meaning charity in Latin) which had the purpose of helping impoverished Romanians during the transition to capitalism and promised eight times the money invested in six months. Funar paid for space in the local newspaper to publish a list of the "winners" who would see their money multiply eightfold; the list was 44 pages per day less than a month before the scheme collapsed.
Size
The size of the scheme is unclear. Estimates vary between two and eight million depositors. The number most commonly quoted in the Romanian newspapers is four million, while the international newspapers tended to estimate their number to two or three million. In Autumn 1993, the list of names to be paid on a certain day as published in a Transylvanian newspaper included 22,000 names, which suggests that there were 660,000 depositors at one time.
Dan Pascariu, a banker and the chairman of Bancorex, estimated that between 35% and 50% of Romanian households were involved in the scheme. Mugur Isărescu, the president of the National Bank of Romania, estimated that it held a third of Romania's banknotes at one point.
An estimate of Romanian newspaper România Liberă gives the amount of money involved as 1.4 trillion lei or about 20% of the 1993 expenditures of the Romanian government of 6.6 trillion. or being afraid that such a measure would make it more unpopular.
There were discussions in parliament on banning such schemes. The state-controlled Romanian Television ran a negative report on Caritas, which indicated that it might have problems with the state.