From DECI to QVSE: Ponzi schemes haunting Kenyans for over 2 decades

Every few years, Kenya gets a new version of the same old trick.

A platform appears promising extraordinary returns for almost no effort. Early joiners get paid exactly as promised. Word spreads through churches, staff rooms, family WhatsApp groups and boda boda stages.

Recruitment is rewarded more generously than the "investment" ever is. And the person running it all somehow never quite exists; no verifiable history, no public record, nobody who's ever met them in person.

Then, without warning, withdrawals stop. The operator vanishes. Thousands are left counting losses that, across two decades, now add up to billions of shillings.

Here is a list of the Ponzi and pyramid schemes that have defined that cycle in Kenya, from the one that set the template to the one currently under investigation.

Before mobile money, before crypto, before online trading apps, there was DECI. It remains the largest and most damaging Ponzi scheme in Kenya's history.

DECI promised investors a staggering 30 percent return every month. For a while, it actually paid, which is exactly how these schemes buy themselves credibility and pull in the next wave of victims.

By the time it collapsed in 2006, DECI had swallowed more than Sh8 billion from roughly 94,000 recorded investors.

A government task force later put the figures slightly differently, citing 93,485 investors and about Sh2.4 billion, equivalent to roughly $28 million at the time.

Its founder, the late George Donde, became one of the most hunted names in the country and died years later, leaving tens of thousands of victims without recourse.

Furious survivors eventually organised into a victims' association, tens of thousands strong, and sued government agencies, including the Central Bank of Kenya, arguing that money frozen from the scheme's accounts should have been returned to them.

Almost twenty years later, most are still waiting.

A government task force set up afterwards catalogued 271 separate Ponzi and pyramid schemes that had operated in Kenya at one point or another, ranging from giants like DECI down to schemes with barely a handful of investors. Investigators believed the true number, including cases nobody ever reported, was significantly higher.

Fronted by a self-styled bishop, Ekeza Sacco drew members in with promises of land ownership and dividends. It's accused of swindling investors out of more than Sh1 billion, with many members left without the land or returns they were promised.

Registered in Kenya in 2021, NMK Capital lured more than 5,000 investors into a six-month investment contract requiring a minimum deposit of Sh50,000, promising a redeemable monthly interest of around 15 percent.

When the company's directors fell out, the man at the centre of it disappeared. Investors were left chasing money tied to off-plan houses that were never delivered and leased vehicles they never recovered.

The Directorate of Criminal Investigations eventually stepped in, confirming the firm had links to a sister company under separate investigation for the same kind of scheme.

A self-described crypto mining platform, BTCM asked investors to put in anywhere between Sh600 and Sh266,000 in exchange for a share in bitcoin mining equipment, promising returns of up to 350 percent within days.

As with almost every Ponzi scheme before it, the platform worked exactly as designed in its early days, paying out just enough to build trust before disappearing with what remained.

QVSE is the scheme currently dominating headlines, and its playbook borrowed heavily from the ones before it, just dressed up in a new costume.

Operating locally as Global Investment Group, QVSE promised Kenyans they could turn deposits of roughly Sh65,000 or Sh130,000 into steady daily profits by "trading" shares of companies like Tesla and Apple.

Investors received trading signals through a messaging app, were told to convert their earnings into cryptocurrency via Binance, and then cash out to M-Pesa, with the platform taking a cut of every withdrawal.

Recruitment was the real engine. Bigger payouts were promised for every new investor brought in, and that incentive turned an already suspicious trading platform into a full-blown pyramid, spreading through staff rooms, workplaces and family networks nationwide.

Corporate filings later showed the company behind QVSE was only incorporated in the United States in mid-2025, for a filing fee of $50, despite claiming to have been founded years earlier and headquartered in New York.

Its American registration covered basic money-transfer services, not securities trading, and no Kenyan licence was ever found.

By early September, withdrawals across the platform froze. Accounts were locked, with notices citing US financial regulations that had nothing to do with the platform's actual registration.

An estimated 7,000 Kenyans are believed to have invested through QVSE and Global Investment Group.

The scheme had already been flagged by Ghana's securities regulator in July, and by August it had drawn questions in Kenya's own Parliament over its ownership and legal status.

On 12 September, Kenya's Capital Markets Authority formally named 15 entities it says are operating unlawfully and fraudulently soliciting money from the public, with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations already involved.

They include: Global Investment Group (GIG), QVSE, Kore Exchange, and Abacus Wealth Management.

Others are Brown Advisory Group, B Invest, Bitblock Capital Limited, Maliwave Investments, Monetrix Capital Investments, Twenty-four Hours Pro Expert Trader, Wealth Sharing Group (trading as Opticoin), CBEX, Just Markets, Ultima Cryptocurrency, Lukman-trust Fund.

None of the entities holds a licence or approval to offer investment services in Kenya, according to the regulator.

Anyone who has already paid into one of these schemes has been advised to report to their nearest DCI office.

Two decades separate DECI from QVSE, yet the mechanics are almost identical.

Only the costume changes, a get-rich land deal, a sacco with a bishop's name attached, a crypto mining rig nobody ever sees, an app that speaks fluent Wall Street.

Each new scheme borrows the language of something legitimate, banks, regulators, the stock exchange, the church, the sacco movement, because that borrowed credibility is what convinces people the risk isn't real.

And because Ponzi schemes pay real money in their early months, the first wave of investors becomes the scheme's most convincing marketing tool, unknowingly recruiting the next wave that ultimately funds their own payouts.

The regulator's advice has stayed the same through every collapse: verify any investment platform against the official register before committing money, and treat any return that sounds too good to be true exactly as it deserves to be treated.

Two decades of billions lost suggest that advice is easier to give than to follow.