Westgate manager arrested, charged with fraud. They claimed $600 to $900 million in assets but only had $100 million. Their supposed auditing firm was a virtual office and they could route calls to it to anywhere. How convenient.
How big is the Westridge scam? Hundreds of millions appear to have vanished.
Then of course there’s Stanford and Madoff, whose pillaging is in the billions of dollars.
Where did all the money go? Sure, lavish lifestyles and keeping the Ponzi schemes going accounts for some of the money. But enormous sums appear to have just … vanished.
For crimes of this magnitude to occur, many had to be involved. That would almost have to include banks and hedge funds, some of whom almost certainly are in the United States and at the very least didn’t ask any questions about where the money came from. What’s more likely is that some of them were directly complicit.