Hello and welcome. I am Harriet Lowndes and this is The Confidence Ledger, the show where we follow the money through the great frauds of history. Today we are in Boston in the summer of 1920, standing in a queue outside a small office on School Street where a charming Italian immigrant is promising to double your savings in ninety days. His name is Charles Ponzi, and the scheme that will carry his name for the next century lasts less than a year. Here is the thing that still surprises me. The arithmetic was impossible from the very first deposit, and plenty of people said so out loud. So why did it keep growing? We will go through the sums, the newspaper that finally did them in public, and what the investors got back. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us open the ledger.