It’s always fun to read about American fraudster Bernie Madoff — mostly because he’s one of the few headline acts of the GFC who didn’t get away with it.
This week’s piece in New York Magazine gave us a glimpse into Bernie’s South Carolina jail cell. Based on interviews with Madoff’s fellow inmates, NY Mag reports that the billion-dollar conman is now a prison “celebrity” who is “past apologising” for his crimes:
He does maintenance work for 14 cents an hour, shares a dinner table with an obsessive-compulsive criminal named Muscles and pays a fellow prisoner to do his laundry for $8 per month.
One fellow convict, bank robber KC White, claims Madoff is scornful about those who lost money in his corrupt Ponzi scheme.
“F-ck my victims,” Madoff is alleged to have declared at one point. “I carried them for 20 years and now I’m doing 150 years.”
That contempt reminds us of something… Oh that’s right, this headline — Banks gorged during crisis:
“As the sagging economy left many Australians in tough circumstances, the banks managed to extract an extra 9 per cent in fee income from consumers and businesses in the 12 months to June 30 last year.
“Reserve Bank data released yesterday showed fees charged to households rose by 3 per cent to $5 billion. Businesses were hit harder, with a 13 per cent jump in non-interest fees to $7.7 billion over the same period.”
Anyone for a banana?
A banana? No thanks, but I’d settle for a Banking Super-Profits Tax.
If you think Madoff ran a huge scam, Amway has ripped off millions of people for several decades, to the tune of 10s of billions of dollars.
Read about it on this website: http://thenetprofitgroup.yolasite.com and forward the information to everyone you know, so they don’t get scammed.
Amway is a scam, and here’s why: Amway pays out as little money as they can get away with, so they support the higher level IBOs ripping off their downline via the tool scam.
As a result, about 99% of IBOs operate at a net loss, while the top 1% make several TIMES more from their Amway tool scam than from the Amway products. This was made illegal in the UK in 2008, but our FTC is unable to pull their heads out of their butts to stop it here.
We may well have our very own version of the Madoff ponzi right here in Oz. The Trio Capital /Astarra funds management debacle has secured suprisingly little by way of mention in most mainstream media apart from Fairfax, yet its overseas BVI based ARP schemes carry all the hall marks of a gigantic fraud on its Australian (mainly elderly pensioner) investors. ASIC has known about this now since September 2009, yet seems to have actually done nothing so far to bring to justice the perpetrators behind the scam.