Fifteen years after Bernie Madoff was sentenced to prison for running the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, a fund created by the U.S. government to compensate his former customers is winding down.
The Madoff Victim Fund is distributing more than $131 million in its 10th and final round of payments, the Department of Justice said in a news release Monday. It will bring the total amount of compensation to $4.3 billion shared among nearly 41,000 people across 127 countries, the DOJ said.
Each person compensated through the fund will recover almost 94% of their proven losses, according to the DOJ. The department said the last batch of payments is "the culmination of a decade of work identifying thousands of victims around the world and unwinding layers of complex financial transactions.”
The Madoff Victim Fund began compensating people in 2017, with most of the funds coming from assets recovered from the estate of the late Jeffry Picower, who was a Madoff investor and one of the biggest beneficiaries of his scheme, according to the DOJ.
Some victims have also received compensation through court-appointed trustees working to untangle the scam and recover money from investors. Irving Picard, a court-appointed trustee, has distributed almost $14 billion to former Madoff customers, CNN reported.
Madoff, a Wall Street financier and former Nasdaq chairman, was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 after pleading guilty to 11 federal felonies that included multiple counts of fraud. He died in 2021 at the age of 82.
By the time he was arrested at his Manhattan penthouse in 2008, he had been swindling customers for decades through his wealth management firm. It involved him paying off customers with money raised from other customers, not with investment trading gains as he claimed, CNBC reported.
Wealthy families and large charities and universities lost money, but the DOJ said most victims were small-level investors who each lost around $250,000.
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