Ponzi's ancestors had been well-to-do, and his mother continued to use the title "donna", but the family had subsequently fallen upon difficult times and had little money.

[6] In 1907, after several years of failing to achieve success in the U.S., Ponzi moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and became an assistant teller in the newly opened Banco Zarossi, a bank located on Saint Jacques Street started by Luigi "Louis" Zarossi to service the influx of Italian immigrants arriving in the city.

However, he found out that the bank was in serious financial trouble, because of bad real estate loans, and that Zarossi was funding the high interest payments not through profit on investments, but by using money deposited in newly opened accounts.

[7] Ponzi stayed in Montreal and, for some time, lived at Zarossi's house, helping the man's abandoned family while planning to return to the U.S. and start over.

Eventually, he walked into the offices of a former Zarossi customer, Canadian Warehousing, and finding no one there, wrote himself a check for $423.58 in a checkbook he found, forging the signature of Damien Fournier, a director of the company.

Confronted by police who had taken note of his large expenditures just after the forged check was cashed, Ponzi held out his wrist and said, "I'm guilty".

He ended up spending three years as Inmate #6660 at St. Vincent-de-Paul Federal Penitentiary, a bleak facility located on the outskirts of Montreal.

Rather than inform his mother of his imprisonment, he posted her a letter stating that he had found a job as a "special assistant" to a prison warden.

Morse, a wealthy Wall Street businessman and speculator, fooled doctors during medical exams by eating soap shavings to give the appearance of ill-health.

Ponzi set up a small office at 27 School Street, Boston, in the summer of 1919 attempting to sell business ideas to contacts in Europe.

He received a letter from a company in Spain asking about the advertising catalog which included an international reply coupon (IRC), leading Ponzi to find a weakness in the system which, at least in principle, gave him an opportunity to make money.

He also went to several of his friends in Boston and promised that he would double their investment in 90 days, in an environment when banks were paying only 5% annual interest.

[7] Even though Ponzi's company was bringing in fantastic sums of money each day, the simplest financial analysis would have shown that the operation was running at a large loss.

This was the only method Ponzi had to continue providing returns to existing investors, as he made no effort to generate legitimate profits.

[7] Ponzi lived luxuriously: he bought a mansion in Lexington, Massachusetts,[13] and maintained accounts in several banks across New England besides Hanover Trust.

On July 31, 1920, Ponzi told Father Pasquale Di Milla, the director of the Italian Children's Home in Jamaica Plain, that he would donate $100,000 in honor of his mother.

The next business day after this article was published, Ponzi arrived at his office to find thousands of Bostonians waiting to give him their money.

He managed to divert the officials from checking his books by offering to stop taking money during the investigation, a fortunate choice, as proper records were not being kept.

The paper contacted Clarence Barron, the financial journalist who headed Dow Jones & Company, to examine Ponzi's scheme.

Barron then noted that to cover the investments made with the Securities Exchange Company, 160 million postal reply coupons would have to be in circulation.

Gallagher commissioned Edwin Pride to audit the Securities Exchange Company's books—an effort made difficult by the fact Ponzi's bookkeeping system consisted merely of index cards with investors' names.

The move forced Massachusetts Attorney General J. Weston Allen to release a statement that there was little to support Ponzi's claims of large-scale dealings in postal coupons.

On August 11, the Post published with a front-page story about his criminal activities in Montreal 13 years earlier, including his forgery conviction and his role at Zarossi's scandal-ridden bank.

At the urging of his wife, Ponzi pleaded guilty on November 1, 1920, to a single count before Judge Clarence Hale, who declared before sentencing, "Here was a man with all the duties of seeking large money.

He sued, claiming that he would be facing double jeopardy if Massachusetts essentially retried him for the same offenses spelled out in the federal indictment.

[20] Ponzi was indicted by a Duval County grand jury in February 1926 and charged with violating Florida trust and securities laws.

Ponzi traveled to Tampa,[20] where he shaved his head, grew a mustache, and tried to flee the country as a crewman on a merchant ship bound for Italy.

After Ponzi's pleas to Calvin Coolidge and Benito Mussolini for deportation were ignored, he was sent back to Massachusetts to serve out his prison term.

[2] During World War II, however, the airline's operation in the country was shut down after the British intelligence services intervened and Brazil sided with the Allies.

[2] Supported by his last and only friend, Francisco Nonato Nunes, a barber who spoke English and had notions of Italian, Ponzi granted one last interview to an American reporter, telling him, "Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price.