Everybody Wants To Be The Ponzi

Nothing like making a game about a sad and serious circumstance to help shed a little light on why certain practices in the world are illegal. So is the case with Celufun's mobile based social game Made Off, in which you either play an investor or a a fund manager, each trying to make the most of Ponzi scheme investments. The game is there to poke fun at Bernie Madoff and the "funds" that he was running for many years.

Some of you might know of Bernie Madoff and how he recently plead guilty to a number of crimes such as fraud, money laundering and perjury after pulling off one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. He basically used the investment money from new investors to pay the interest on older investments, while never actually investing any of the money. The Feds finally cracked down on him, and he's now looking to possible receive a sentence of up to 150 years in jail.

So as you can see, Ponzi schemes are serious business; however, in the cellphone based game Made Off you are only playing with cellupoints, so no real money is exchanged. With some people playing as fund managers, and others as investors, the game encourages the managers to try and get as many people on board as possible. The scheming will going on for quite a while until:

the game will end without warning when the Feds finally crack down on the Cellufun community, and people managing Funds will get to keep all the Cellupoints invested in them. Investors will keep all the Cellupoints they've acquired through interest payments as well. And we'll give trophies to those who have "made off" with the most profits...

Seems like an interesting social game, because it basically requires you to get other people to sign up and play in order to keep your "fund" going; however, it almost seems like it would be better suited for a social network site like Facebook. The game will keep running up until Madoff gets sentence on June 29th and then Feds will show up to stop the fun at some undisclosed day afterwards. So head on over to the site, and check out what it's like to be in a Ponzi scheme, just don't tell the Feds I sent ya.

Ponzi video game mocks Madoff [CNN Money]
[via GamePolitics]