In 1960 Bernard Madoff opened a penny stock trade called “Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.” Eventually he used online technology to quote stock prices in order to compete with the traders of “The New York Stock Exchange.” However, his firm would then make the stock trade over the telephone, not over the internet. In 2008, the year of his arrest the average daily volume of trade was going through Madoff’s firm $740 million.
In 2009 he was found guilty of orchestrating a ponzi scheme that lost $64.8 billion of investor’s money. New York Times said, “Its unraveling took tens of billions of dollars of fictional wealth from thousands of victims around the world.” And to make matters worse, this all happened during a very rough time for the United States. Kaleigh Alessandro stated that, “Amidst the nation’s most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, we all learned of Madoff’s devastating scheme.”
…show more content…
In 2011 the total of claimed that had been filed against Bernard Madoff was 16,519 claims. All of those people had lost money because they had chosen to do their business with Madoff’s firm. Some investors lost the money they invested into Madoff and others lost money simply by doing business with Madoff. Diana B. Henriques wrote that, “Civil fraud charges were filed in April 2009 by the New York State attorney general against J. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager whose formidable reputation was tarnished when Wall Street learned that, for more than a decade, he had merely been handing his clients’ money to Mr.