Today's society is rife with all kinds of scams, and countless people suffer from them.
We can never guess the conspiracy of fraudsters, we can only try to take measures to prevent fraud.
You may have heard that there was once a listed company called MBI Malaysia, the founder of which was a fraudster, and the company itself was a pyramid scheme.
During its operation, the organization defrauded two million nationals of more than $500 billion. The company's founder fled to Thailand and was arrested by Thailand** in July 2022.
Why would a listed company become an MLM organization? And how did the company's founders hide their identities and commit fraud?
Today, let's learn about this story together, and hope that everyone can be more vigilant against scams.
MBI shocked the world and made many people curious about the mastermind behind this **. Now let's first find out who the fraudster behind this shocking ** is.
His name is Teo Yu Huat, and he is a Malaysian Chinese.
After taking a closer look at Zhang Yufa, we will find that he can be called "a good hand played poorly".
Zhang Yufa's grandfather was a group of Nanyang immigrants who came to Malaysia that year. At that time, Zhang Yufa's grandfather came here with all his family property and started doing business in Malaysia.
In Zhang Yufa's grandfather's generation, their family was already a relatively wealthy family in Malaysia. Subsequently, Teo's father took over the business and grew the family business even further, making the Teo family one of the most prominent Chinese businessmen in Malaysia.
It can be seen that Zhang Yufa is not only a rich second generation, but a rich third generation.
For this son, the Zhang family has high hopes. Since he was a child, Zhang Yufa's father began to teach him to do business.
At that time, every time Zhang Yufa's father went out to talk about business, he would take his son with him and let him follow him to study and exercise.
Subsequently, when Zhang Yufa entered junior high school, when other children of his age were still immersed in the game, Zhang Yufa had already earned his "first pot of gold" in school.
At that time, Zhang Yufa started a business in school, and he would wholesale some beautiful stationery and accessories that girls liked, such as combs, at low prices.
As soon as the students in the school saw that the products brought by Zhang Yufa were not only exquisite, but also cheaper than the ones they usually bought, they immediately chose to buy them from Zhang Yufa.
After graduating from high school, Zhang Yufa was admitted to a top finance university. At that time, he had the hope that after graduation, he would be able to build his own business empire like his father.
However, when Zhang Yufa graduated from high school and officially entered the society, he realized that the business world of adults was not as simple as he expected.
In the 90s of the 20th century, Zhang Yufa realized the importance of mobile phones to people's lives early.
So, he immediately decided to invest in this industry and invested the money he had accumulated over the years into the field of mobile phones, opening several mobile phone chains.
Sure enough, mobile phones soon became the most popular product at that time, and the era of a mobile phone for everyone came, and Zhang Yufa made huge profits from it.
However, in 2008, the global financial crisis swept in, and this crisis also had an impact on Zhang Yufa's mobile phone industry.
In order to avoid further losses, Zhang Yufa gave all the mobile phone stores to an American company, and he began to move to other industries.
Soon after, during the economic downturn in Malaysia, a coffee brand called "Red Island Cafe" appeared.
It is the property in which Zhang Yufa invested, however, Zhang Yufa did not really run coffee and restaurants, but to carry out his fraud scheme.
At that time, Zhang Yufa used the Red Island Cafe and packaged it into a money-making project to attract people to invest, and it only cost 9,000 yuan to invest.
He promised investors that they would get huge rebates and other benefits as long as they took a stake. According to Zhang Yufa, he can get 5% of the income every month.
According to such calculations, it will take less than two years for the investor to recoup his capital and receive additional benefits. Zhang Yufa also told people that the sooner they invest, the sooner they can return to their original capital, and the more they will return.
As a result, more and more people are jumping into this ** and scrambling to invest in it.
However, when twenty months later, something unexpected happened.
At first, more than 3,000 shareholders invested in the Red Island Cafe for high returns.
But as time went by, the business of the café did not improve, but closed down one after another because of the poor quality of the coffee.
Shareholders are finally realizing that the money they invested is no longer recoverable. They began to suspect that this might be a **, and they reported the crime to the local **.
* Quickly arrested Zhang Yufa, the founder of Hongdao Cafe, but by this time he had already defrauded about 30 million yuan.
However, none of the shareholders got a penny back. This made Zhang Yufa even more presumptuous, and he found that it was much easier to make money through such "shortcuts" than to make money honestly. So, he began to plan the next scam, targeting the middle-aged and elderly people in China.
Around 2010, Zhang Yufa discovered that middle-aged and elderly groups in China were very wealthy, but most of them were not well-educated and lacked knowledge.
These middle-aged and elderly groups are eager to get rich overnight by starting a business like people in the past. Therefore, Zhang Yufa decided to target China's middle-aged and elderly people.
At that time, many older people did not know much about the Internet, but they knew that the Internet was an advanced and novel technology.
Based on this, Zhang Yufa created an Internet company called "Dream Group", which mainly sells electronic products. He organized employees to distribute leaflets to middle-aged and elderly people to introduce their companies, and claimed that Internet companies are new and advanced industries that can make money quickly.
At a glance, middle-aged and elderly people see words such as "making money", "emerging" and "advanced".
Although they don't know much about the Internet, they know that ** is making a big push for it.
Therefore, some elderly people who want to invest come to Zhang Yufa's company with flyers. In the face of these innocent old people, Zhang Yufa told them that their corporate income is very high and can be multiplied several times.
The company advertises a maximum yield of 70%, which means getting rich at any time.
Then, the "Dream Group" adopted a similar model to the Hongdao Cafe, that is, to develop the offline line.
The elderly who first invested began to recommend it to their friends and relatives, and promoted it layer by layer, and more and more people invested in the "Dream Group". The initial investors did get a yield above the principal amount invested, so it wasn't long before a lot of people realized that it was a money-making venture.
However, there are bottomless pitfalls hidden behind all these gains. As the saying goes, if you want to eat sheep, you must first fatten them. At that time, the middle-aged and elderly people in China were Zhang Yufa's "sheep".
In the first half of 2014, everything was normal. However, on the first day of September, the Dream Group's deal** suddenly could not be opened.
Investors are starting to panic and try to find a solution, but ** is still inaccessible. Initially, people thought it was just a problem and believed that the company must be trying to recover. But no one thought that this ** had completely collapsed.
Soon, people realized that the ** they had relied on for several years turned out to be a **. Everyone hurried to Zhang Yufa's company, but at this time, the company was empty.
These seniors were already in poor health, and many became ill when they found out that they had been cheated out of their life savings.
China** immediately launched an investigation, however, Zhang Yufa had already arranged everything, found a scapegoat in advance, and fled to Hong Kong to live a free life.
Although some people accused of criminals were arrested, the money of those old people could not be recovered. For the old people, this situation is unacceptable, and you can imagine how devastated the old people were at that time.
However, Zhang's path to fraud is far from over. After three years of hiding, he reappeared in the public eye in 2017, this time with his MBI group.
MBI Group is a huge business, and people only know that the founder of the group is a philanthropist, involved in various industries such as real estate, restaurants, etc.
Since the group plans to go public, it was decided to give the original shares to the society. No one was aware of the problem behind the group, so the original shares were quickly snapped up by investors.
Sure enough, MBI Group soon went public, and the person who initially bought the original shares made a lot of money and therefore continued to follow the group.
After the listing, MBI Group did not stop accumulating capital, and was still in the first class of equity, and was classified according to the amount of investment by shareholders.
Similar to Dream Group and Hongdao Cafe, through the development of downlines and uplines, the uplines can recruit people, and the downlines can continue to pull people in to develop their own downlines.
In this way, the more people you recruit and the higher the upline level, the higher the earnings.
Subsequently, MBI Group launched the much-anticipated M coin, which at that time could be exchanged for 50 to 100 yuan.
This kind of profit is liked by everyone, so more and more people are buying M coins, and the sales volume of the MBI Group is getting higher and higher.
However, China soon realized that this was actually a pyramid scheme of old scams and virtual currencies.
As a result, China immediately began investigating the MBI Group and found that the group did not have any real industry, just a financial group set up to cheat money.
Subsequently, China added MBI Group to the list of dangerous companies and reminded all investors to be wary of being scammed.
At the same time, China contacted Malaysia and asked them to also mark the MBI Group.
However, because the investors of the MBI Group were profiting from it at that time, they did not listen to the advice of ** at all and continued to invest funds.
Knowing that China and Malaysia** had noticed them, MBI Group quickly ran away.
In China alone, more than 2 million people have been defrauded by MBI groups, with a total amount of more than 500 billion yuan! This money is people's hard-earned hard-earned money and savings, and some people even repay loans and investments in order to make profits.
No one would have thought that such a listed company would be a pyramid scheme. At that time, many people fell into despair, some even chose to commit suicide, and many families were torn apart as a result.
In 2019, many victims traveled to Malaysia to ask for justice.
However, no one thought that Zhang Yufa had fled to Thailand with money in 2019, and he was not worried, let alone guilty.
Neither China nor Malaysia will let him go. In July 2022, Zhang Yufa, who fled to Thailand, was arrested by Thailand**. Unfortunately, the money that was defrauded has long been spent by Zhang Yufa's family, and the victims can no longer recover their money.
This story tells us that we must be careful of all kinds of ** that may appear at any time, and the good things that fall from the sky will not be on your head.