Don't understand when the scam started. Please help

If you want please check the story of Calgary's Bre-X which the movie was based on. I lived a few blocks away from their main office and I can remember the gold fever that hit the city and everyone pouring their life saving into the company. The real problem was on the Alberta Stock Exchange which is nearly unregulated and prone to scams like this where the company was raising money from investors by private investing not a public offering of stock. The rules for private investing means you don't have to show or prove anything before people invest. The geologists that salted the core samples with gold knew this and they could get away with the fraud for quite a while. That means a lot of people believed the hype and bought private shares and then began trading them publicly. Once the private shares began being traded publicly but still under the rules that they didn't have to prove anything. It wasn't till they reached 6 billion in value that the Freeport analysis came out showing no gold that the fraud was revealed.

In the real life story. The main culprits sold most of their shares before the crash and moved to tax haven Caribbean islands with no extradition. They have not paid any restitution to investors and have avoided jail time because courts have said they followed the rules of private not public investing where it is buyer beware.