Financial Crimes:  Are They Victimless?

By Lynn A. Granata

There is an umbrella term which describes financial crimes. It mostly directs to one word, if not several, fraud, Forex trading crimes, embezzlement, etc.  Remembering Bernie Madorf about ten years or so ago, what he has done was create a Ponzi-scheme.  He was advertising a business like back in the old days, except rather than a chain letter, it was being advertised in the newspapers and the classified section.  It was a work at home scheme, whereby he was selling computer software pertaining to actually nothing.  Like a whisper and then pass it down to the next individual and then the next, until it leads to nowhere. 

I am not that familiar with what it exactly was he was selling and what kind of software, but, I'll do my best to verify as much credible facts as possible to find out.

There are a lot of Forex trading software information being sent everyday and at every millisecond to email accounts everyday. They end up in the spam folder.  You may or may not have gotten one but they come in all shapes and sizes and from impostors from every corner of the globe. This information is useless, because all it does is simply lead you to a page with a big credit card logo, that's right, to get you to buy something worth nothing. Bernie Madorf was doing just that.  His software would sell for hundreds of dollars, after you bought his software then you would receive instructions written and copied to a CD.  Giving you instructions to do the exact same thing and send hyperlinks to a bunch of people (victims) on a list.  Where was the list? Well it was on the CD that you bought from his little Forex trading scheme. They were HTML codes that you'd presumably get off of the software to cut and paste into a browser, so that they'd create a widget for a purchaser to send emails to a bunch of servers.

Madorf continued to do this until he was reported for not paying his taxes. He never reported anything to the government about this enterprise he was running.

He lost all the money he received, because, a Ponzi-scheme leads to a dead end. He advertised it, telling people how they could become millionaires overnight. Anybody who fell for it was out of hundreds of dollars with no way to recoup their money.

Those that did buy it found out soon enough that there's no way you can become a millionaire overnight. So they lost, and Madorf lost, because he literally went broke from his lack of earnings. He couldn't make anymore CD's he was not getting enough "chain" sales.

Today Madorf is sitting in a federal penitentiary reflecting on his life until the end of time.