A Madoff client who may have lost upwards of $1.8 million has leaked copies of the trading records to Dealbook.
The trades look authentic, but at this point no one know if they actually happened or not. Madoff has admitted to a $50bn Ponzi scheme, so falsified records would have to be part of it.
I’m a database programmer, among other things. Generating thousands of plausible looking statements and trade confirmation each month, especially when the data is bogus, is not a trivial task. There’s no way he did this alone or even with a few family members. Just the database coding alone would have involved quite a few people.
This is fraud and theft on a massive scale. By any yardstick, it is organized crime. So, who else was involved? Because lots of other people had to have been.
Here’s what I don’t get. He must have seen this coming a ways off if it was a real Ponzi scheme. Why not have his “records” take a hit when the markets plumeted in real life? He could have knocked the lot of them down to the point that it may have survived a bit longer, maybe long enough to continue the scam. And who would have questioned it? Everyone got hit. His people would be disapointed, but most would have gone with it, figureing they did better than most in the market over all.
And I agree, this was way too big for him to have pulled off alone, especially for the lenght of time it’s been going on. I could see it if it was just 5 or 6 years, because even the DB side could be done by one man given the time and the effort. But 10, 20, 30 years? That takes more than one person.
Maybe it was a scam from the start. Serious organized crime…