Word: scammed
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When Bernard Madoff's huge Ponzi scheme burst, the New York Post reported, in its typical cut-to-the-jugular style, that suicide hotlines were lighting up in Greenwich, Connecticut, home to many of the financial high-rollers snared by the alleged $50 billion scam. But the deadly fallout from it was no joking matter. Only a couple of weeks after Madoff's mischief was revealed, French financier Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet killed himself in his New York City office, apparently distraught by his having lost more than a billion of his clients' (and his own family...
...Madoff's direct victims but does not list the many other thousands of entities, from banks to charities, that were burned in Madoff pension, feeder and subfeeder funds. In testimony yesterday before the House Financial Services Committee, Harry Markopolos, an early whistle-blower on Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scam, said there were at least 14 known major feeder funds. (See pictures of the demise of Bernie Madoff...
Like any good affinity fraud, Theodule allegedly tapped into the trust of his people - in this case, Haitian immigrants - and used unregistered investment clubs that fly under the SEC radar to make his scam work. The funds were said to be used for new Haitian-American business ventures in the U.S., Haiti and Sierra Leone. He even used the gambit of a fake investment-club regulatory agency he called Smart Investment Management Services LLC to add a measure of security and to tout independent verification. (See the top 10 scandals...
...celebration, and since the temple complex at Puri is closed to non-Hindus, I could only gaze within its walls from the roof of a local “private library.” And so I entered one of the more common and less insidious types of little scams to be pulled on tourists in India.For the privilege of ascending to the roof, the director expects a “donation” to the library and pulls out a book listing tourists, their host countries, and contributions ranging from 100 rupees (about $2) to 1000 ($20) or more...
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...