Word: ponzis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...good for the 8,000 who had registered or direct accounts with Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, a broker/dealer. In fact, right now, most are busy filling out their just arrived SIPC claim-recovery forms in hopes of getting back half a mil. See a brief history of Ponzi schemes...
...consecutive congressman, first disgraced Representative Mark Foley and then his successor, Tim Mahoney, who lost his re-election bid in November after admitting to having multiple extramarital affairs and paying hush money to one of his former mistresses. And Palm Beach was the winter home of alleged Ponzi scheme leader Bernard Madoff, who found many of his allegedly bilked investors in the area...
...methods and motives remain cryptic, but the carnage unleashed by Bernard Madoff is beginning to be revealed: in a New York City federal court, where the former Nasdaq chairman stands accused of masterminding a $50 billion Ponzi scheme; in congressional hearings; and in the Manhattan office of a French financier who killed himself after Madoff bilked him and his clients out of more than $1 billion...
...Ponzi Schemes--in which a swindler touts outsize returns, parries questions about legitimacy with hefty dividends and creates the illusion of solvency by paying off early investors with capital raised from later entrants--are named after Boston businessman Charles Ponzi. From 1919 to 1920, the Italian immigrant coaxed thousands of people into sinking millions of dollars into a complex deal involving international postage rates, which he said would earn a 50% profit in 90 days...
...Ponzi wasn't the scam's first practitioner; that was probably a New York City grifter named William Miller, who fleeced investors out of $1 million--more than $20 million in today's dollars--in 1899. The cons have since grown: a Florida church netted $500 million in a 1990s fraud that promised God would double the money of pious investors. Boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, in addition to foisting 'N Sync on an unsuspecting public, stole $300 million from clients over two decades. And citizens poured some $1.2 billion into Albanian pyramid schemes after the fall of communism; when...