Remember Bernie Madoff? Big time financial fraud is back

Ten years ago this December, Bernard Madoff, known as a “broker’s broker” to many on Wall Street, told his sons that his business was one big, $65 billion lie.

It turned out that Mr. Madoff wasn’t the only financial adviser stealing from clients. In the following months, a wave of fraud involving financial advisers and brokers came to light. In February 2009, Allen Stanford, sitting atop a network of brokers, was charged with running a massive, $7 billion fraud based on phony certificates of deposit.

In 2010, InvestmentNews identified Ponzi schemes with more than $9.2 billion in losses. The charges of shocking frauds and Ponzis gradually died down, but not before harming countless investors and wiping out their life savings.

Jump ahead to August 2017. The Department of Justice filed criminal charges against Dawn Bennett, with parallel charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that she and her retail sports apparel business sold a fraudulent unregistered securities offering that raised more than $20 million from at least 46 investors from December 2014 to July 2017. Read More