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“Ponzi Scheme” is a term that was coined about 100 years ago. It was named after an Italian immigrant, Charles Ponzi, who realized he could get investors by promising large returns for undefined, high-yield investments. His endeavor needed to make just enough money to keep attracting new investors, whose money, after Ponzi’s cut, was used to pay some of the earlier investors. In our modern day, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme resulted in losses in the billions of dollars when the stock market tanked during the Great Recession. Selling the Deal Americans are just beginning to see the tip of the...

The Department of Justice announced today that the Madoff Victim Fund (MVF) began its sixth distribution of approximately $488 million in funds forfeited to the U.S. Government in connection with the Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (BLMIS) fraud scheme, bringing the total distributed to almost $3.2 billion to nearly 37,000 victims worldwide. In this distribution, payments will be sent to over 30,000 victims across the globe, bringing their total recovery to 80.05 percent. This distribution represents the sixth in a series of payments that will eventually return over $4 billion to victims as compensation for losses they suffered from...

Bernie Madoff, the financier who pleaded guilty to orchestrating the largest Ponzi scheme in history, has died in a federal prison, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural causes, the person said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity. Last year, Madoff's lawyers filed court papers to try to get the 82-year-old released from prison in the COVID-19 pandemic, saying he had suffered from end-stage renal disease and other chronic...

The Rise and Fall of Charles Ponzi. Charles Ponzi The Documentary | History of the Ponzi Scheme. Bernie Madoff who died in prison at the age of 82 is today the most famous Ponzi Schemer, but Charles Ponzi is the man this con was named after.Charles Ponzi The Documentary | 1:12:52Patrick Boyle | 556K subscribers | 1,419,258 views | November 8, 2020

This is bigger than Bernie Madoff, but unlike Bernie Madoff, who was getting rich off a Ponzi scheme, the Democratic Party was getting rich off of FTX. FTX came onto the scene in 2019, and it spent $10 million to put Joe Biden in the White House in 2020. And the guy running FTX, the second-biggest Democrat donor in the midterms after Soros, of course, spent $40 million to get Democrats elected.

Like the disastrous Bernie Madoff debacle where investors lost millions of dollars, Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently cost investors like Steph Curry, Shaq and Tom Brady considerable sums as well. What do Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried have in common? Greedy investors who apparently didn’t bother to monitor what was going on. Yes, had they monitored FTX, Bankman-Fried’s company, they would have noticed that FTX held less than $1bn in liquid assets against $9bn in liabilities. Generally, with buyer beware, the onus falls on investors to monitor what is going on. But The Fed’s completely dropped the ball on Bernie Madoff...

How to Destroy a Nation by Undermining Trust (Part 1)What We Can Learn About Bureaucratic Incompetence from the Bernie Madoff and Uvalde DebaclesOn a December evening in 2008, Harry Markopolos told his wife Faith to go into battle drill. They had rehearsed it many times. If someone entered their premises, he would go down to the first floor to confront the intruders, armed with offensive and defensive weapons. Meanwhile, Faith would wait upstairs, fully loaded. Her instructions were simple: if anyone approached who wasn’t him, she would start shooting and continue shooting until she ran out of ammo.To the outside...

The sister of disgraced Wall Street fraudster Bernie Madoff, along with her husband, were found dead last Thursday in their home in an apparent murder-suicide, officials announced on Sunday.The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office reported: Around 12:55pm on February 17th Deputies responded to a 911 call advising a male and female were unresponsive inside their residence. Upon arrival deputies located an elderly female and male deceased from a gunshot wound.Detectives from the Violent Crimes Division arrived on scene to investigate further. After further investigation it appears to be a murder/suicide.

Bernie Madoff had some of his toes amputated, was missing eight teeth and wildly hallucinated before he died from kidney disease, a new report says. The notorious 82-year-old con from New York City was serving a 150-year sentence for his $65 billion Ponzi scheme when he reportedly refused dialysis and died April 14 at a federal prison hospital in Butner, NC. About a week before he succumbed, the reviled former financier screamed for assistance, and when a nurse responded, he stared at the floor, wiggled his left foot and yelled, “Help! I hate this ******* place!,” according to Market Watch.

For 12 years, business journalist Jim Campbell has interviewed members of Bernie Madoff’s family and exchanged letters with the fraudster himself in prison. His new book, “Madoff Talks,” comes out in two weeks. Here, Campbell reveals some of what he learned about the notorious case.“Jim, I have no problem with what you have laid out,” Bernie Madoff wrote to me from prison, in exquisite cursive, about my request for an interview. “I must add that both Andy and Ruth felt good about your sincerity.” I never imagined becoming pen pals with perhaps the most vilified person on the planet. Nor...

New York (AP) -- Bernie Madoff, the financier who pleaded guilty to orchestrating the largest Ponzi scheme in history, died in a federal prison early Wednesday, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural causes, the person said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

Bernie Madoff, whose $65 billion Ponzi scheme made him one of the world’s most hated criminals and destroyed even his own family, died Wednesday at the secure federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina, where he was serving a 150-year prison sentence, according to prison officials. The Associated Press reported the 82-year-old scam king, who had been suffering from end-stage kidney disease and other chronic ailments, died of natural causes. Madoff would have turned 83 on April 29. His epic stock fraud, which came to light amid the global financial crisis of the late 2000s and remains the biggest in...

At the start of National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, the Department of Justice today announced that on April 20, the Madoff Victim Fund (MVF) began its fifth distribution of approximately $378.5 million in funds forfeited to the U.S. Government in connection with the Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (BLMIS) fraud scheme, bringing the total distributed to over $2.7 billion to nearly 38,000 victims worldwide. In this distribution, payments will be sent to over 26,000 victims across the globe, bringing their total recovery to 73.65 percent.  This distribution represents the fifth in a series of payments that will eventually return...

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,Every single line item in our entire Bernie Madoff scam of a system is cooked.My theme this week is The Great Unraveling, by which I mean the unraveling of our social-political-economic system of hierarchical, centralized power. Let's start by looking at how the basis of governance has transmogrified from consent of the governed to consent of the conned.In effect, our leadership leads by lying. As we know, when it gets serious, you have to lie to preserve the perquisites and power of those atop the wealth-power pyramid, and well, it's serious all...

Ponzi king Bernie Madoff is seeking new business ventures behind bars — in the hot chocolate market. Madoff , 78, has bought up all Swiss Miss packets from the commissary at the Butner federal correction complex in North Carolina, and is reselling them for a profit, according to a report. “Bernie really was a successful businessman with quite original insights into the market, and he’s continued applying his business instincts in prison,” journalist Steve Fishman told MarketWatch after interviewing Madoff at length for his new podcast “Ponzi Supernova.” “He made it so that if you wanted any, you had to...

Many of you have probably seen the ABC miniseries, Madoff, about disgraced Wall Street investment manager Bernie Madoff who in reality ran a massive Ponzi scheme. How accurate was his portrayal by actor Richard Dreyfuss can be up for debate but what is not debatable, but now mostly forgotten, is that Madoff invested heavily in the campaigns of mostly Democrats. Just after the Madoff scandal broke in December 2008, the extent of his political contributions to Democrats was revealed by CNN.Com:

Despite an issue with his heart, 77-year old Bernard Madoff is “doing as well as can be expected” serving a 150 year sentence at a federal prison in North Carolina, according to Ira Sorkin, the lawyer who represented him when he pleaded guilty to the largest financial crime in American history. “I think he’s had a little bout, little bit of a heart problem,” Sorkin told ABC News. Most troubling to Madoff, according to Sorkin and several inmates who served time with him, is that his wife Ruth stopped visiting him years ago and none of his grandchildren have come...

U.S. prosecutors and regulators are expected to announce this week that J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. will pay slightly more than $2 billion in penalties for alleged failures to warn about Bernard L. Madoff's massive fraud, said people familiar with the negotiations.

Eliot Spitzer, who as New York attorney general was known as the “Sheriff of Wall Street” for his crusade against investment fraud, has acknowledged that his family was swindled by the man accused of running what could be the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

“Just get buzz…” That’s what a former MSNBC anchor recently told me is the primary objective of network President Phil Griffin. Create some noise, get some free press—good or bad—doesn’t matter. It’s all about drawing people to a place they otherwise wouldn’t visit. In the words of James Earl Jones, “Oh…people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. “ When it came to getting buzz, no one did it better for MSNBC than Keith Olbermann. Sure, half the country held him in the same contempt normally reserved for a Bernie Madoff or Casey Anthony. But he got his name...