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Thousands of distraught depositors have been flocking to a suburban police station in the past two days to lodge complaints against Sakvithi Ranasinghe.

Ranasinghe had posed as a popular English tutor and also ran investment firms.

Police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekera said several complaints had been received about the scam.

About 2,000 people had gathered at the Mirihana police in a southern suburb of Colombo, Monday, when a team from our sister news website Vimasuma.com visited the station.

Angry depositors were demanding police hand over a suspect they said they believed had been detained.

Police in Mirihana said they had received about 5,000 complaints about the scam.

Depositors and police said Ranasinghe, the suspect fraudster, had attracted deposits from the public by publishing ads in newspapers for many years.

One woman depositor who spoke with Vimasuma.com at the Mirihana police station said she had deposited 2.5 million rupees which she had earned after working for years in Lebanon.

"In the first few months I managed to get interest with difficulty," she said. "Now I hear he (Ranasinghe) has stolen the money and fled abroad. We ask for a reasonable solution from the authorities."

She displayed an investment certificate under the name of Sakvithi House Constructions, in Nawala Road, Nugegoda, a nearby suburb.

Ranasinghe ran several companies included one called S R Profit Sharing Investments.

He had been questioned by the central bank some months ago about his newspaper advertisements calling for deposits.

Sri Lanka's central bank has repeatedly warned the public against Ponzi and pyramid style investment scams.

The government brought in new laws a few years ago after a popular pyramid style Goldquest multi-level marketing scheme was banned and several of its members arrested.

The central bank has also run a publicity campaign warning the public against being duped by the offer of high returns.

A Ponzi is a variant of a pyramid scheme which offers high returns to people who deposit money.

But the payments are not actually met from the underlying business, but from deposits or fees of those who join the scheme later.

Such scams are named after Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who lived in the United States, who offered high returns for investing in his firm, which traded in international postal reply coupons.