Caritas (Romania)

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Caritas was a Ponzi scheme in the early 1990s in Romania.

It was organized by the "Caritas" company of Cluj-Napoca, owned by Ioan Stoica and it was started in 1991. Caritas promised eight times the money invested in six months. It attracted 400,000 deponents from all over the country who invested 1,257 billion lei (about a billion USD) before it finally went bankrupt on 14 August 1994, having a debt of 450 million USD.

The owner, Ioan Stoica was sentenced in 1995 by the Cluj Courthouse to a total of seven years in prison for fraud, but he appealed and it was reduced to two years; then he went on to the Supreme Court of Justice and the sentence was finally reduced to one year and a half. He has been free since 14 June 1996.

It is still unknown why the authorities allowed this game to go on and where a large part of the invested money went. The trials between the deponents and the Caritas company still continue, as of 2004.