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The majority of Madoff fleecing victims had no idea they were invested with Madoff. Funds parked assets with Madoff to avoid SEC notice that the $$ was actually moving from the Funds to Madoff’s balance sheet. They were never informed, and had no ability to find out, that the money was with Madoff. Even if they knew it, they’d need a PHD in advanced mathmatic theory to figure out what was going on with Madoffs high-volume investment supercomputer programs.

The people who got truly robbed in this were the soft millionaires, people who both earned and were still in the process of earning that money. Newsflash, Freepers: You cant work the 60-80 hrs/week to make that money, then somehow magically invent another 60-80 hrs a week to manage your own investments on a hr-by-hr basis. If you try, you can forget about the whole ‘married with children’ thing.

A lot of these people were robbed of their life savings, outright, while the policing agencies their taxes were removed to fund were playing FreeCell and masterbating to pictures of Alan Greenspan.

People are mainly talking about those featured on the media, who sought out Madoff and put their money under his care.

For others whose broker ended up parking money at Madoff's outfit, it is of course a different story.

By the way, bubble collapse usually hit soft millionaires hardest. They are the most ambitious and aggressive. When they lose money in this kind of event, they tend to hit the rock bottom, a couple of level down in class totem-pole.

At least there wasn’t any of that initiative robbing over-regulation going on.

Keep in mind, most of the Madoffians were savvy, successful business people who were accustomed to compiling, reading, and picking-apart financial statements. At least one Madoffian who spoke to reporters was a stockbroker; she and her family invested w/ Madoff for generations.

LEGAL PRINCIPLE This should foreclose any cockamamie ideas that taxpayers are gonna bailout these mega-millionaires.----the compelling legal principle of “condonation” operating here---implied forgiveness for certain behavior. Meaning investors implicitly “condoned” Madoff’s actions over a period of time--sometimes decades.

His investors willingly acquiesced to Madoff's activities in several ways:

(1) Sending Madoff enormous sums of money, sums that were spread out over time (some families invested for generations), even AFTER they had the opportunity to assess their investments;

(2) Referring other investors to Madoff (if the investment was so bad, why did they bring in other investors?);

(3) Taking profits out of the investment, rolling it over, or putting more money in;

(4) Writing PERSONAL checks to Madoff's subrosa spinoff vehicle that was not listed on the Securities Exchange (tax evasion modus);

(5) Accepting, without question, Madoff’s obviously flawed monthly statements.

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REFERENCE BY Ronald D. Orol, a MarketWatch reporter, based in Washington.

EXCERPT There were several things that alerted some in the hedge-fund industry that an investment with Madoff may not have been as safe as it initially appeared. Aksia LLC, which researches hedge funds and advises institutions about investing in the industry, said that it never recommended that clients put money in some of the "feeder funds" that allocated their capital to Madoff. On the surface, these feeder funds looked like institutional-quality vehicles, but there were "a host of red flags," Aksia Chief Executive Jim Vos and colleague Jake Walthour wrote in a letter to clients after the Madoff scandal erupted last week.

The funds were marketed as using a "split-strike conversion" investment strategy that is "remarkably" simple, but the returns it purportedly generated could not be replicated by Aksia's quantitative analyst, Vos and Walthour wrote.

The Madoff funds supposedly traded in the Standard & Poor's 100 index options market, but that market is relatively small and may not have been able to handle trading by vehicles with roughly $13 billion in assets, they said. The feeder funds had almost all their assets custodied with Madoff Securities, the brokerage unit of Madoff's firm.

Aksia checked into the auditor of Madoff Securities and discovered it was a firm called Friehling & Horowitz, which had three employees -- one of whom was 78 years old and another was a secretary. The firm's office in upstate New York was 13 feet by 18 feet, Vos and Walthour said. Madoff's Web site claimed the firm was technologically advanced, but it sent paper confirmations of trades via U.S. mail at the end of each day, rather than providing electronic access to this important information. "Paper copies provide a hedge-fund manager with the end-of-the-day ability to manufacture trade tickets that confirm the investment results," Vos and Walthour wrote.