This paper estimates the impact on crime rates of a large negative income shock led by the simultaneous crash down of various Ponzi schemes at the end of 2008 in Colombia. The crunch of Ponzi schemes aected hundreds of thousands informal investors who lost tens of millions of dollars. Using data on the spatial incidence of the Ponzi schemes and their crashing date we estimate the eect of the negative income shocks on crime rates at the municipal level. Using matching and dierence-in-dier ences techniques on monthly frequency data, we nd that the shock dierentially exacerbated cash-grabbing crimes in aected municipalities relative to places with no presence of Ponzi schemes. In particular, we nd a positive eect on mugging, commercial theft, and burglary, but no signicant eect on major crimes like murder or terrorism. These ndings are robust to controlling for dierential pre-trends in crime levels. We further show that the escalation in crime rates is larger in municipalities where access to formal credit is limited and where judicial and law enforcement institutions are weaker.