Bernie Madoff

American fraudster and financier (1938–2021)

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Lived 1938–2021, aged 83United States

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Wikipedia
54 languages
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Era
1938–2021
Aged 83

Summary

Updated 2026-08-17

He ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history — $65 billion in client money vanished through a fraud so vast that when his sons turned him in, the lie had been running for decades. He'd been chairman of Nasdaq, a pillar of Wall Street, and no one at the SEC caught it until he confessed.

Biography

About

Born in Brooklyn in 1938, Madoff graduated from Hofstra and founded a penny stock brokerage in 1960 that grew into Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. The firm had two sides: a legitimate, high-profile stock brokerage that became the sixth-largest market maker in S&P 500 stocks, and an asset management unit he kept exclusive and quiet. That second unit was a lie. On December 10, 2008, his sons Mark and Andrew went to authorities after Madoff told them the asset management business was "one big lie" — a Ponzi scheme he claimed started in the early 1990s, though an ex-trader later testified…

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