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I naively thought that it would take centuries of inflation before seeing ponzi schemes beating the magnitude of Madoff, it only took 10 years.

• arthurcolle 4y ago
  The future is now!
• nullc 4y ago
  81% of the Madoff losses were recovered (not including funds paid for taxes on false gains), not so in the land of "web3", "defi", and "ico". Through innovative meta-scam-blockchain technology they manage to "accidentally" substantially all the monies.
  • ericjang 4y ago
    s/substantially/sublimate ?
    • nullc 4y ago
      I think I intended to say they accidentally the whole money. But substantially gives substantially the same feel.
  • 1-more 4y ago
    I'm trying to square this with the info on the Wikipedia page. Is this just "The Madoff Recovery Initiative reported $14.418 billion in total recoveries and settlement agreementse" divided by "of which $17.3 billion was actually invested by customers?" If so that's even better at north of 83%.
    • Animats 4y ago
      Madoff recovery amounts are based on how much cash the investor put in, not what their statement said their balance was just before the crash. So long-term holders get none of their supposed profits. The longer someone invested with Madoff, the more they lost. The recovery project is only for direct investors with Madoff. Those who bought into "feeder funds" which fed into Madoff's fund don't get anything directly. There's other litigation involving feeder funds, which can recover something from the Madoff recovery and pay it out to their holders. The recovery initiative got back billions of dollars through clawback lawsuits, where they went after people who'd cashed out of Madoff's scheme before the crash. Those people were effectively participants in the scam, and they profited from it, so they don't get away free. If you can track the money, you can un-do a Ponzi. The amount of legal effort is huge, though.
      • tartoran 4y ago
        How can you undo spending on lavish consumables? If he bought a watch for $100,000,000, you’d be lucky to recover a few % of that. Sure, properties and such would likely appreciate in price but the actual detangling process is extremely expensive too!! Still am glad the victims could recover anything at all!!
• paxys 4y ago
  The vast majority of Madoff's victims were middle class pensioners who had their entire lives upended because their fund managers trusted the wrong person. In this case it's hard to feel any sympathy for crypto speculators.
  • Animats 4y ago
    By number, maybe. By dollars, no. Madoff's core operation was based on scamming rich Jews in New York City, Palm Beach, Florida, and Hollywood. In each location, he had a prominent Jewish leader steering investors to his fund. Ezra Merkin handled New York, Stanley Chais handled Hollywood, and Madoff himself worked the Palm Beach Country Club. This was very much an in-person scam. A long list of celebrities lost big. That's why the recovery operation was so long, so extensive and so successful. The major victims were well connected, could afford expensive lawyers, and collectively, they had a lot of clout. The crypto world tends to have less well connected suckers.
    • Cd00d 4y ago
      Your point would not be weakened if you left ethnicity out of it, but risks coming across as un-credible and conspiracy driven with the addition. I'd recommend an edit.
      • telotortium 4y ago
        No, he's not accusing Jews of "running the world" or anything like that. It's a fact that Madoff focused on finding victims of the Ponzi scheme in his community, which is not at all unusual (MLMs often encourage their participants to sell to their friends and acquaintances, for example). As a well-off American Jew himself, Madoff went after his community of well-off American Jews, calculating correctly that their in-group trust would make them easier targets. It's also a fact of the world that the rich are generally better able to pursue legal action to recover money that they've lost than the poor. The fact that these rich people were Jewish doesn't make much of a difference here (not to mention that the Madoff scheme was extremely infamous after it imploded, so it was more likely to receive resources to rectifying the wrongs that Madoff dealt as compared to an equally-damaging but less well-known scheme).