If you’re not familiar with whistleblower Harry Markopolos, his story is absolutely bananas: Starting in 2001, he started whistleblowing to the SEC that now-infamous Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff was a fraud. He ended up alerting the SEC eight times over the course of the decade. Yet every single time, they found no wrongdoing. In reality, Madoff was stealing other people’s money to run the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. financial history.
Madoff is rotting in jail now. Markopolos, meanwhile, continues to run a firm that examines finance fraud. He told ABC News last week that he’s working on uncovering multi-billion dollar Ponzi schemes, dropping that one of them is “much bigger than Madoffs. Via:
At least three major Ponzi schemes are currently scamming American investors, according to Harry Markopolos, the man whose warnings about the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme were ignored by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).
“I’m working on three multi-billion dollar Ponzi schemes today,” Markopolos told ABC News, including one that he says will be bigger than Madoff’s. “You can’t stop them.”
Markopolos, who declined to identify the names of the scams until he provides the information to government investigators, now runs his own private financial fraud detection business and continues to work as an adviser for federal law enforcement agencies.
“Everybody wants to believe in the holy grail of finance, risk-free returns, and they keep investing in Ponzi schemes,” he said.
Well that’s a little bit terrifying. The only way to be safe is not have any money. Or invest in gold and maximizes those returns by frequent visits to the Cash 4 Gold pawn shop in your local strip mall.
[H/T: Business Insider]