Ponzi scheme

JPMorgan Chase made more than $900 million in pretax profits from the Madoff scam according to the findings made in the course of the latest study of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Dr. Linus Wilson, a finance professor at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, published the paper where he uses newly released data and different methods of calculation than previous studies.

Citi is sued for unsavory dealings with Bernard Madoff with the lawsuit seeking $425 million from the bank. According to the Madoff trustee Citigroup Inc tried to pass on its exposure to Bernard Madoff to other banks just months before his fraud was revealed.

Citi saw obvious signs of fraud about Bernard L. Madoff investment Securities LLC as early as 2005 but decided to hold back on it, said Trustee Irving Picard in a court document.

One of the defendants in Madoff case Italian bank UniCredit SpA has filed a lawsuit against Irving Picard, a trustee liquidating Bernard Madoff's assets. According to the papers Irving Picard has exceeded its authority vested by the U.S. Congress.  

As it has become known, the court-appointed trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard Madoff's investment company, Irving Picard, is going to file new lawsuits to recover funds from investors who suffered from the Ponzi scheme. 

Bernard L. Madoff’s wife Ruth Madoff is living down his husband crime, when he defrauded investors of as much as $65 billion in a Ponzi scheme, by delivering meals to the homebound in a 1996 Infiniti in south Florida.

Madoff Ponzi scheme victims are being further tricked into another scam. The Securities and Exchange Commission is alerting investors about a Web site that falsely claims to have recovered $1.3 billion in funds hidden by convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff in Malaysia.

Victims are asked to provide their personal information to verify that they are on a refund list. But in fact the data are used by the con artists for ripping off these financial fraud victims.

The trend of creating and running a hyip is becoming popular now due to the potential of making huge amount of money online by cheating or scamming other people’s real and hard earned money.

Even tough this activity is unethical, but the facts that running a hyip can make the owner become rich overnight and without any hard work outweigh the morality aspect. Greediness makes people turn to heartless and emotionless monsters.

According to experts the following year will be marked with heightened regulation and more aggressive prosecutions after this year of the Ponzi scheme revelations.

John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University, notes that in 2009 the Securities and Exchange Commission became much stricter and it will likely issue more criminal referrals next year. However he doesn’t expect much success for these prosecutions. He says that the cases will likely result in monetary penalties in 2010 but probably will involve "people lower in the food chain."

 Robert Miller, a former enforcement lawyer with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, confessed himself guilty of illegal actions. He admitted that he impersonated two people to help confessed Ponzi scheme operator Marc Dreier defraud hedge funds. Miller pleaded guilty in the Manhattan federal court on Monday that he took part in the attempted sale of a $44.7 million fictitious promissory note to two hedge funds but he impersonated other people. First he pretended to be a representative of the Canadian pension plan and later a representative of an Icelandic hedge fund.

 The Securities and Exchange Commission reported that it had charged Detroit-area stock broker Frank Bluestein with fraud, alleging that he lured elderly investors into a $250 million Ponzi scheme after convincing many of them to refinance their home mortgages.

The SEC alleges that Bluestein acted as the single largest salesperson in the Ponzi scheme operated by Edward May and his company, E-M Management Company LLC (E-M). The SEC previously filed charges against May and E-M in connection with the fraudulent scheme.