Bernie Madoff

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Bernie Madoff
America has seen its share of fraudsters who have defrauded innocent civilians of their savings through the establishment of Ponzi schemes used as the tool for duping the public. Bernie Madoff is one of the famous white-collar criminals in American history that was responsible for deceiving investors most of whom had committed their savings out of $65 billion in investment. Ponzi schemes are not a new phenomenon but have neem in existence since the 1950s. They refer to financial scams where the investment is premised on the promise of high returns to the investors without the possibility of high returns. However, the entire model was a ruse where the central operator, uses the investment of new investors to finance the gains of the already existing ones.
This was facilitated by the presence of a feeder fund connected to a master-fund which in this case was Fairfield Greenwich. It was sued together with the perpetrator Bernie Madoff for not doing diligence to the investors who lost billions in savings. However, all the involved parties were blamed for being over complacent on the matter and investors were so interested in making profits that they did not review their statements (Sander 99). It would have been possible for them to identify inconsistencies such as the ones the whistleblower, Harry Markopolos forwarded to the SEC as evidence that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.
Madoff was a prominent businessman and well respected in Wall Street, and this made it impossible for the SEC to believe he would be involved in fraudulent acts under their supervision.

Markopolos had raised concerns about the Madoff Hedge fund but the SEC did not act on this (Sander 130). It was after Madoff discovered that he was unable to pay the sum requested by investors that he confessed to his sons who turned him over to the authorities.
Work Cited
Sander, Peter J. Madoff: Corruption, deceit, and the making of the world’s most notorious Ponzi scheme. Lyons Press, 2009.