Notorious Scammer Bernie Madoff Dies in Jail

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Bernie Madoff, the notorious scammer that made billions as he run the largest Ponzi scheme ever (Bitcoin not included) has died age 82 of natural causes. Bernie was in jail for the last 12 years, and he checked out from our dimension at at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina.

His lawyers filed court papers in 2020, trying to get Bernie released from prison quoting the Covid-19 pandemic, and arguing that their client suffered from end-stage renal disease and other chronic medical conditions.

Bernie Madoff’s request was denied.

Bernie scammed various investors and convinced them to put an estimated 17.5 billion dollars into his business. Over 13 billion dollars were recovered in the end by a court-appointed trustee, but at the time of his arrest, he was telling customers his business is worth 60 billion.

Madoff was a Wall Street trader in the 1980s, and, as expected, he concocted a scheme in order to defraud people who trusted him with their money, i.e. his investment clients. He took billions from individual investors, as well as pension funds, charitable organizations, hedge funds etc.

He promised them big investment gains in any  market conditions via sophisticated hedging/trading strategies, yet the SEC later claimed he never traded any shares for client accounts.

In May 2000,Massachusetts financial analyst Harry Markopolos tried to alert the SEC to Madoff’s fraud, saying his alleged trading strategy could never yield such continuously positive returns. The US securities and exchange commission ignored his warning several more times over the next few years.

Early in December 2008, Madoff told his sons that the business was “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme”. He estimated the fraud to be $50bn. Prosecutors later allege that the combined balance on client statements was approximately $64.8bn.

Bernie cheated 4800 customers, both in the US and abroad, and in May 2009, Bernie Madoff was jailed after pleading guilty to all 11 charges against him, as he was sentenced to 150 years in a federal prison.

By today’s standards, Madoff was an amateur.

Madoff told his biographer that banks knew he was committing fraud but chose not to do anything about it. The biggest story in this is that the SEC failed to act.

Our own government, the one we elect and pay for, utterly failed to do its job. Repeatedly. This is the same government that wants to do everything for us.

 

 

 

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Chris Black
Chris Black
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."