Company Frauds So Terrible You Won’t Believe They Actually Happened

Scott Croker|Business|22 Mar 2018

Bernie Madoff Gets Life

Bernie Madoff is serving a life-sentence for the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

Bernie Madoff, through his company Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to life in prison for running the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. In 2009 Madoff plead guilty to his crimes and was sentenced to 150 years in prison along with $170 billion in restitution fees.

In a Ponzi scheme, an investor gets a client to invest money into a non-existent enterprise they are told will be successful. When Madoff was arrested, it was revealed that he had secured over $64 billion from investors, a number of whom had to file for bankruptcy afterward.