A private invitation to ruin
Bernard Madoff has taken the secrets of his Ponzi scheme to his relatively comfortable new jail accommodation where he will spend the rest of his life. No one knows, and he isn’t telling, how long his fraud lasted, how much it netted and who was in it with him
by
Ibrahim Warde
The economic crisis has uncovered all sorts of financial scams. After ultra-sophisticated products that promised the earth before dragging down the whole financial sector, we have what seems to be the most primitive kind of fraud: pyramids. To avoid the risk of making bad investments, the promoters of such operations don’t bother with placing the money they take. They simply plunder deposits, using sums deposited by the most recent investors to pay back the earlier ones, and pocket the rest.