You have no sympathy for people who are swindled? Don't think it couldn't happen to you? It can. If it did, I wouldn't blame you for making what you thought was a legitimate investment. He was no fly by night guy, he was the former head of the NASDAQ Exchange.

@barjoe It also boils down to doing research and a little common sense. I will not buy into ANYTHING that I even SLIGHTLY suspect is fishy. There may have been innocents that have been swindled by him.......I know what your saying, but the ones who were like him and just wanted to pile on more and more, that’s my main point.

@barjoe And the fact alone that he was the former head of that NASDAQ exchange should have been a red flag right there.

@CuddyCruiser One of those double down guys. Huh!

Blame the victim! Greed? You mean wanting to make money on an investment? SMDH

@barjoe I have a friend who invested over £500.000 he inherited from his late father in London and Capital bonds. They were guaranteeing an 8% return when the bank rate was around 0.2 %. Of course it went belly up and he will probably lose all or most of it.
It has affected him badly and he has spent the last 18 months investigating the company and trying to get the perpetrators in court with out success.
He was very naive as were the people who fell for the Madoff Ponzi scheme. If it looks too good to be true then it probably is.
One thing interests me. He was sentenced to 180 years in prison when the sentence for murder i s normally less than 25 years. Looks like money ,means more than someones life.

@Moravian In many states in the US, 1st degree premeditated murder is punishable by death.

@barjoe And since 1973 . 150 people have been released from death row because they were innocent of the crime. I wonder how many innocent people were executed.

@Moravian You said financial crimes are punished more severely than murder. I wasn't endorsing the death penalty, just saying it's more severe than life in a federal pen. That being said, some people deserve to die.

@barjoe Sentencing is certainly much more draconian in the USA where the running of prisons is a lucrative business. I was thinking about the situation in the UK where a life sentence can be as little as 20 years.I do not agree with the death sentence partly for the reason I gave and because it is more about revenge than justice.

The death penalty isn’t too much better. Sometimes the best thing for people like Madoff is to just let them suffer, regardless of how painful it is.