Word: scam
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...grand your ill-gotten Bentley or your cooked-books villa, they have to be hard to enjoy when you know that at any moment the jig could be up. The hope - and the thrill - is in the fact that that's only one possibility. The other is that the scam is so good you'll never be nabbed...
...scheme - as anyone smart enough to engineer one knows - is a plan that is uniquely without an exit strategy. It requires a constant infusion of new investors to pay off a growing body of existing ones, and ultimately it becomes impossible to find enough suckers. When that happens, the scam collapses. Sure, you could always flee the country before the roof caves in, but many scammers don't and Madoff famously didn't. The reason lies in the personality - or, more accurately, the personality disorder - that drives them to such frauds in the first place...
...course, a non-violent willingness to hurt other people for your own enrichment describes every mortgage bundler or junk-bond scammer who's ever forged a balance sheet. What distinguishes the Ponzi artist is the sheer scale of the scam...
...also means that, at first, it makes you very rich, very fast. "The financial payoff is so much larger," says Minnesota-based forensic psychologist Steven Norton. "The money comes in, the power comes in and that pushes them." What's more, says Galieti, the pyramid structure of a Ponzi scam means that there can be only one person at the pinnacle - an appealing idea for a narcissist who would just as soon not work invisible frauds inside a big investment bank...
...York Anatomy of a Scam Celebrated money manager Bernard Madoff was arrested for allegedly bilking investors out of up to $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme described as one of history's largest swindles. The scam's blueprint hasn't changed much since Charles Ponzi's 1920 fraud: 1 Entice investors by promising an unusually lucrative rate of return. 2 Use a portion of the raised capital to pay out early dividends, thereby giving the appearance of legitimacy--which in turn attracts more investors. 3 Pay off earlier investors with money accrued from later victims. 4 When no further capital...