Old scam, new clothes: MBI and the coin that "only goes up"

A seminar, and what MBI was

In 2016, an investor named Randy Ang sat through an investment seminar. Speakers painted overnight riches—one said that if you followed along you would go "from driving an ordinary car to driving a Ferrari." Afterward he put in a five-figure sum. The company was MBI, and you can guess the rest: the money was gone. Alongside him, an estimated two million people handed over their cash, across Malaysia and China.

MBI—Mobility Beyond Imagination—started in Penang around 2012, founded by Tedy Teow. The mechanics, taken apart, are just three steps: you pay in for a "package," anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands; you receive a self-issued coin (often called GRC) said to only ever rise; and you recruit more people, earning more the larger your downline. By step three the red light should be on—isn't this just pyramid recruiting? It is. But what made MBI truly dangerous was the respectable-looking skin it wrapped around this.

The skin was called M Mall

If it were only a coin and recruiting, anyone slightly wary would walk. So MBI built M Mall—an online-to-offline shopping mall (they called it O2O). Its job was to answer the deadliest question: why is your coin worth anything? MBI's answer: because you can use it—spend the coin in M Mall, backed by real shops and real merchants, so the coin has "real value behind it."

This step is the soul of the whole scheme: dressing a recruit-and-coin money game as an "O2O tech company with a real business." It is exactly the move Carrian used—real property deals masking the fact that everything underneath was borrowed money—using a visible "real business" to blur a hollow core. But the mall could not hold up the coin: real trade in M Mall was tiny next to the flood of money pouring in. The coin "rose" not because the mall earned anything, but because there were always new people willing to buy in at a higher price.

Hold up the three old questions, and it shows

In Is modern finance a Ponzi scheme I laid out three old questions for telling whether something is a money game. Applied to MBI, it is almost a clean sweep. Where do returns come from? Early entrants' "returns" come mainly from later entrants' money. Is anything real there? The coin has no matching real value; M Mall cannot support its scale. Does it collapse if new money stops? The moment recruits dry up and everyone cashes out at once, the coin price and the whole pool crash.

Three for three. So however much it talks of "blockchain," "O2O," and "the digital economy," at its bones it is a money game. And it expanded startlingly: by around 2016 it had reached China, Taiwan, Japan, and New Zealand, with China worst hit and victims later estimated near two million—Teow was even nicknamed "Jho Low 2" by the press.

Collapse and the manhunt

Paper cannot wrap fire, and neither can a crypto skin. In May 2017 Malaysia's central bank (Bank Negara) seized MBI and froze accounts—but the money had long scattered, and only about RM177m was recovered; MBI was placed on the central bank's financial alert list.

Teow fled to Thailand and kept operating. He was arrested there in July 2022 and extradited to China in August 2024—where the charges involve a crypto pyramid scheme worth some US$14bn. Asset recovery continues: in 2025 the operation code-named Ops Northern Star had seized or frozen about RM6.6bn, and those arrested even included property tycoons with Datuk and Tan Sri titles; reports that year also said cross-border seizures, with China's help, reached about US$900m.

The clothes keep changing; the core never does

Put MBI beside Carrian, and even beside Charles Ponzi a century ago, and you see something scary and useful: the scam's clothes keep upgrading while the core barely changes. The clothes differ by era—Ponzi used postal coupons, Carrian used property, MBI used crypto and a mall; the core never moves—pay old entrants with new ones' money, nothing real underneath, kept alive by confidence and fresh cash.

New clothes work so well because they exploit two very ordinary human traits: not understanding—crypto, blockchain, O2O; the less people grasp it, the easier they are cowed by "this is high tech, this is the future"—and fear of missing out—"everyone else is earning and only I haven't boarded," the best fuel any money game has. So protecting yourself is not about chasing new concepts and learning which coin is real (you never finish; tomorrow brings new words), but returning to the three oldest, plainest questions: is my return earned by the business or paid from newcomers' money? Is there anything real behind it to support the value it claims? If no new people come tomorrow, does it still run?

These three need no blockchain knowledge and no ability to read a balance sheet, yet they cut through almost any money game—whatever the skin: stamps, property, or a coin that supposedly "only goes up." Because in the end, whether a coin keeps rising never depends on how lovely its story is, but on one cold thing: whether someone behind you will still take your bag at a higher price. When the buyers run out, the prettiest story cannot pay out a cent.