Secret With Me

Greetings everyone 🙌
When I came across this prompt, the first scenario that appeared to me was my encounter during the COVID-19 lockdown.
During that period, I found myself in the middle of a critical situation where I needed to spoil one of my friends' plans to save the other.

Look at how it happened;
During the lockdown, I was buried in online ways of making money, especially investing and coordinating Ponzi schemes. I was very known because I had a WhatsApp group housing up to 200 active members, and due to the fact that we've stayed in the group for a long time, the normal everyday conversation bonded us as close friends; in fact, we considered ourselves family because there was maximum trust, especially in financial dealings.
Once in a while, members of the group come up with their own Ponzi scheme, they meet me as the admin to help introduce the scheme to the group with a fair promise of not scamming anyone in the group. It sounds funny, right? That was the approach, and it worked very well until a particular guy called ENVOY approached me and introduced his Ponzi site to me to help him advertise to the group.
Yes, he gave the same promise not to scam anyone in the group, even when the vision doesn't materialise to his terms.

I did just as he said, and within a short period after the site launch, members of the group invested heavily in the site while patiently waiting for the space of a month as stipulated to get their capital and ROI.

The payment week arrived, and payments were made to those whose investments were due.
That same week, ENVOY came and complained that he lost half of the people's money (who invested in his site) in forex trading.
I shunned him quickly because that's the usual pattern of Ponzi owners whenever they want to crash (stop paying). I never believed him until he proved otherwise, and I had to succumb to what he was saying.

"So what are you going to do now?" I asked him.

"Bro, it's to cart away with the remaining money with me—I mean, the money they invested—because I'm at a loss too. Let me use the remaining one to sort out a bit of my loss. Please keep it a secret because I will just disappear into thin air, with all my contacts blocked and won't be reachable," he responded, and I gave out a deep sigh.

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It's not that the people in my WhatsApp group were going to attack me; no, we always have the rule of "invest what you can afford to lose no matter the person that comes with the scheme." My problem was how I was going to bear seeing the people get hurt, because most of them invested big money.

I told Envoy to hold for a moment and give me time to think before he strikes(run away with the money).

Mehn, for a whole day, I was lost in thought, thinking of how to remedy the situation so that it wouldn't affect both sides heavily.
I finally came up with an idea: I related to ENViy to bring out some of the remaining money, no matter how small it is, share it with them as a refund, and open up to them on how things went. For sure, the temperature will get wild and hot, but it's better than boldly hurting them without any clue.

Thankfully, the envoy agreed.
As the admin of the group, I called for a meeting. We assembled, and then envoy let out the cat.
You need to see how the group was burning with fire.

He did the refund, the hash talks lasted for a while, and everything went back to normal.

Surprisingly, after like two months, they gave kudos to ENVOY for having decided to do the refund because if it were others, they would disappear without trace.
I was happy that the intended plan of ENVOY didn't come to pass.

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Anytime I find myself in such a situation, I take my time to think of a way to remedy the situation...Every issue has a solution, you know.

Thanks for reading.

This is my entry to Hiveghana prompt of the week

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