Ponzi Scheme | featured news

More than $500 million has been returned to the victims of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, according to the trustee in charge of recovering stolen assets.

Bernard Madoff's investment firm had a "diversion-filled office environment" featuring a culture of "sexual deviance" and drug use, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday against companies that dealt with the Ponzi-scheme mastermind.

Epic swindler Bernard Madoff's two sons, his brother and a niece will be sued this week for $198 million, the trustee winding down the Madoff firm told CBS News' "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday.

Bernard Madoff, convicted of swindling $65 billion through the biggest-ever Ponzi scheme, has told fellow prison inmates that he is dying of cancer, the New York Post reported on Monday, citing unnamed prison sources.

Prosecutors expect to charge Frank DiPascali Jr., a former Madoff lieutenant, with multiple counts of fraud and other criminal charges.

The Internal Revenue Service has begun sending refund checks to investors who paid taxes on money they thought they had made before the multibillion-dollar fraud was revealed.

Three leading publishers have moved up the release dates of their books on how Bernard Madoff accomplished his massive financial fraud.

R. Allen Stanford, the Texas financier accused of directing a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, complained that his jail cell often lacks light and air conditioning.

For the past week, Stanford, who's in a cell in Conroe, Texas, with from eight to 10 other men, has endured heat and intermittent lack of power when outside temperatures reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) or more, his lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, said yesterday in a motion asking that his client be transferred to a downtown Houston jail.

With time credited for good behavior, Bernard L. Madoff might be free in 2039.

Arch swindler Bernard Madoff will not appeal the 150-year prison sentence he received for masterminding a global multibillion-dollar investment fraud, his main lawyer said on Thursday.