Ponzi Scheme Mastermind dies in US prison at the age 82.

Bernie Madoff, a well-known Wall Street investment advisor, became world-famous for operating possibly the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Madoff served as non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ exchange in 1990.
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was operated through the wealth management portion of his business. It was a classic – and simple – Ponzi scheme. Madoff attracted investors by promising them extraordinarily high returns on their investments. However, when investors handed over the money, Madoff just deposited it into his personal bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank. He paid “returns” to earlier investors using the money obtained from later investors. Things fell apart in 2008 when a large number of investors wanted to cash out their investments due to stock market crash.
When investigators for the FBI and the SEC finally uncovered the massive fraud in 2008, losses by Madoff’s investors were estimated at $64.8 billion over the course of nearly 20 years and sentenced to 150 years in prison. Madoff’s thousands of victims included individuals, charities, pension funds and hedge funds. The United States government ended up offering to pay out more than $700 million to defrauded Madoff investors, but that amount paled in comparison to the billions upon billions of dollars that investors had been scammed out of. However, it is true that some of Madoff’s earliest investors did manage to recover their full investment amount plus a hefty profit.