Fortunately, we at USDemocrazy never owned billions of dollars. If we did, we would have probably lost it all in the recent Wall street turmoil (either way, we end up broke).

Others have not been so lucky.

The now infamous Bernard “Bernie” Madoff  was responsible for the loss of billions of dollars to unsuspecting clients.

This week Bernie was sentenced to 150 years in prison, for conducting  THE LARGEST  ponzi scheme in history.

To celebrate Madoff’s conviction for this despicable yet history making crime, we at USDemocrazy have decided to put together “Swindler’s list,” our directory of the biggest and baddest ponzi-investment scammers in history.

The crime.

Ponzi schemes persuade people to invest their money into a fraudulent company or investment agency of some sort which generates or “yields” unusually high returns.  Investors are shown their “earnings” through mailed “cooked” statements (we prefer to call them cookbooks)

Such operations are cheap to run and potentially very lucrative. Ponzi scams are among the most common investment scams.

 Ponzi schemes end unpleasantly in 3 ways:

(1)  A “run on the bank.” Investors ask for their original investments, plus any returns they might have accumulated. The ponzi scheme collapses when these returns cannot be paid back.

(2) Authorities discover the scheme. By then some $$ is usually already lost.

(3) Ponzi scammer disappears into the horizon with the investments and is never seen again. Investors lose BIG $$.

The criminals.

1920 Charles Ponzi –  Italian immigrant for which the Ponzi scheme is named. He swindled approximately $7-10 million. Not much by today’s standards but epic for his time.

1986 Barry Minkow- As a teenager, Minkow claimed to own a multi-million dollar carpet cleaning company. At 22 he was exposed and charged with 57 counts of fraud. Now he works for the government to expose similar swindlers. It takes one to know one.

1996 Emanuel Pinez, James M. Murphy, Robert Silva, Robert E. Lockwood, Bond D. Fletcher - The men worked at Centennial Technologies which produced PC Cards (credit card sized cards that possessed memory storage).

They inflated sales by creating fake product called “Flash 98” — actually empty PC card casings. They also shipped fruit baskets to customers during the holidays to fake and record shipments of an “expensive” company product. 

1998  Samuel Israel III – founded the Bayou Hedge Fund Group, a group of fraudulent investment companies with which he swindled $400 million. Israel staged his own suicide after his conviction, but eventually turned himself in.  

2001 Enron corporate executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling carried most of the blame when the energy giant named “America’s most innovative company” by Fortune six years in a row collapsed. Enron’s “innovations”  were fraudulent bank statements which inflated the company’s worth.

Read about more of the largest investment scams and the schemers that orchestrated them here. From the collapse of Bre- X Minerals (1997), to the more recent debacles of WorldCom (2002) and Tyco International (2002) we got it!