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Bernie Madoff, creator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, dies

Bernie Madoff, an American businessman who managed to defraud his creditors of about USD 65 billion, died during the more than four decades that his fraudulent operation lasted.

With the arrival of the pandemic of coronavirus in 2020, Madoff’s lawyers alleged that he feared for his life in prison, due to the chronic health problems he presented. Since then, he has been in a hospital in North Carolina, where he died this Wednesday, April 14, according to The New York Times.

Madoff, arrested in 2008, amid the global financial crisis , is considered the architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, as well as a symbol of the excesses of the traditional financial system.

Since 2009 The businessman was serving a 150-year sentence in the Federal Butner Complex, located in North Carolina, United States, after confessing multiple federal crimes related to his financial activity in the Wall Street markets.

His The fraudulent scheme worked from the moment he founded his company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, in 1960, and collapsed in late 2008, amid the great financial crisis that exploded that year in the United States and many other countries in the world. world.

According to the New York Times (NYT), the Stock Exchange Commission and Securities (SEC) would have been investigating Madoff since 1992, without being successful in his search for facts that incriminated him in a financial crime.

The businessman had to compensate about USD 170 billion dollars their investors, but according to the same media, until November 2018 they had received only USD 2 billion.

But Madoff’s shares not only cost money , but also human lives. His children, who responsibly alerted the authorities about their father’s crimes, died in circumstances attributable to the stress of dealing with the consequences of everything that happened.

Mark Madoff committed suicide in 2010, while Andrew Madoff died of cancer that returned in 2014 after having overcome it in 2003. Both were heavily investigated by the authorities.

Likewise, it has been reported that clients of Bernie Madoff have committed suicide gave and suffered heart attacks also due to the anguish of losing his money.

Over the years, Madoff built up a reputation as an invincible investor, having always weathered various financial crises with positive balance. In reality, gave profits to his oldest clients with the money of the newest investors, like a Ponzi scheme. In addition, he falsified financial reports, managing to deceive more than 4000 clients

Bernie Madoff starred in one of the most controversial events in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, a crisis that Satoshi Nakamoto took as an ethical justification for the creation of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency.

Damage to confidence in finance and Wall Street is still considered by many to recover, and is partly responsible for the popularity of Bitcoin and other forms of decentralized finance .

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