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Posted
Jul 02 2009, 11:25 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Well isn't this interesting: An investor at the Securities and Exchange Commission told her bosses in 2004 that something funny was going on at Bernard Madoff's firm. One of those bosses would later marry Madoff's niece. And what do you know? The investigator was told to focus on other issues, according to The Washington Post. The investigator, Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, sent e-mails to a supervisor saying her review of Madoff's firm raised red flags. But sources tell the Post that the SEC was under pressure to look for fraud in the mutual fund industry, so Walker-Lightfoot had to end her Madoff investigation to focus on mutual funds. The revelation is just going to be more damaging for the SEC,
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Posted
Aug 26 2009, 07:27 AM
by
Minyanville
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This article is written by Minyanville's Josh Lipton According to a report from the Associated Press, federal prosecutors have charged a woman who once advised a disgraced NFL quarterback and several other pro football players with stealing $3 million from eight victims in a Ponzi scheme. Prosecutors say that the alleged swindler, Mary Wong, worked out of her home in Omaha. Apparently, Wong told clients that she was busy selling investments in high-end properties and private jets. In reality, according to an indictment unsealed Monday, Wong was using the cash to support herself and her business partners. Bing: More on Ponzi schemes
In an unusual twist, three NFL players are also allegedly mixed up with Wong. Demorrio Williams of the Kansas City Chiefs and twins Josh Bullocks of the Chicago Bears and Daniel Bullocks of the Detroit Lions were partners with Wong in a corporation that she ran, which Uncle Sam’s prosecutors say benefited from the Ponzi scheme It’s not clear, as of right now, who lost money or whether Michael Vick’s money was involved in the scheme, according to the AP. But we do know that Vick, who recently signed a two-year contract with the Philadelphia Eagles reportedly worth $6.8 million, has sued Wong, hoping to get back $2 million from her.
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Posted
Sep 21 2009, 04:13 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The IRS is extending the deadline to October 15 for tax cheats who have hidden assets overseas to turn themselves in. It is an odd way to treat law breakers, but the IRS must be recovering a lot of revenue, so the end-point of the program may be pushed out again and again.
The IRS says that more than 3,000 people have come forward under the program, which is set up to lower penalties and spare tax law violators time behind bars.
There are probably thousands of rich Americans keeping money in offshore accounts, so the number of people participating in the program is unimpressive. The amnesty does raise the issue of why the program is being confined to people who have assets outside of America’s borders.
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Posted
Jul 30 2009, 11:00 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 All it took was a little nudge, and now tax evaders are practically lining up to confess to hiding money from Uncle Sam.
President Obama said last May that the government would go after people who skipped paying taxes by tucking undeclared money in overseas accounts. That scared the daylights out of some wealthy Americans, who have begun filing requests with the Internal Revenue Service to disclose their shenanigans, The Wall Street Journal reports. The requests have flooded in so quickly that the IRS now offers a three-page form to expedite the truth-telling. If only all confessions were this easy!
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Posted
Jun 24 2009, 11:26 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Retirees in Germany were so upset with their financial adviser that they ambushed him outside his home and beat him with their walkers, the adviser claims. Then they taped his mouth closed and hauled him into a car.
"It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath," the financial adviser, James Amburn, told the U.K.'s Daily Mail. The kidnappers ranged in age from 60 to 74.
Amburn said they eventually got him to a house, where they chained and tortured him for four days. Two retired doctors also reportedly participated.
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Posted
Aug 28 2009, 10:27 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Bernie Madoff is in jail, but the mess he left behind isn't winding down. His victims are outraged, and they want their money back.
The question now is how much should they get back? Should they receive just the money they originally invested, or the profits Madoff told them was in their account?
That's the latest drama in the three-ring circus that the bankruptcy trustee in the Madoff case is dealing with. Irving Picard is trying to distribute the Madoff money he's been able to recover. So far, he has been operating on a simple money-in, money-out approach. Whatever money people gave to Madoff is what they get back. But that's not enough for some victims,
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Posted
Aug 14 2009, 02:49 PM
by
Minyanville
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This article was written by Minyanville's Mike Schuster with additional reporting by Nico Carbellano.
This has been a high-profile week for cyber criminals. An as-yet-unidentified cyber thief made off with the identities of some 500 dewy-eyed journalism-school applicants by breaking into the UC Berkeley server. Twitter -- the inexplicably popular, profoundly useless social networking site -- was taken offline for the second time, along with Facebook, in as many weeks by the same kind of hack that took down Google (GOOG) last year. And British hacker Gary McKinnon -- accused of pulling off the biggest military computer hack of all time, to the tune of $800,000 -- lost an appeal to avoid extradition to the United States. He'll therefore be tried stateside, where we don't take kindly to this sort of thing.
Despite the scale of these network outages, they can't hold a candle to those affected by some of our more ambitious computer hackers. Click here to view 10 of the costliest cyber crimes of all time.
The business of computer hacking is certainly booming, with hack-related losses totaling a staggering trillion dollars per year worldwide. In February, Ponemon Institute conducted a survey to determine the average loss a business incurs when it suffers a security breach. Reviewing cases from 43 organizations, the group finalized a figure: $6.6 million.
Bing: Cyber criminals
While that might seem like small potatoes for megacorporations like Wal-Mart (WMT) or Best Buy (BBY) -- which experienced data leaks in 2006 and 2007, respectively -- the cost of clients' files being released into the hands of a nefarious hacker could ruin a smaller company.
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Posted
Jun 29 2009, 09:56 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Bernard Madoff, the financier whose fraudulent schemes ruined lives and destroyed charities, is set to spend the rest of his life in prison. A judge sentenced Madoff to 150 years Monday -- the maximum sentence allowable for his crimes.
Prosecutors had asked for the maximum, while Madoff's attorneys wanted only 12 years. The judge, who described Madoff's scheme as "extraordinarily evil," clearly wanted to send a message while ensuring that the 71-year-old man will never taste freedom again.
Cheers and applause reportedly broke out in the courtroom after the sentence was announced -- a response that shows how badly people wanted Madoff to pay for his actions. Madoff apologized before the sentencing, saying he “will live with this pain, this torment, for the rest of my life.”
So one man who abused the system shuffles off to jail, and will probably be forgotten soon. I wonder if anything has changed as a result of his crimes or his sentence.
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Posted
Jun 30 2009, 11:50 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Government negligence pretty much caused the current financial crisis, writes Joe Nocera of The New York Times. Does that mean we can sue the government for our losses? No, he says.
In other words, victims of Bernie Madoff's schemes need to just get over it and stop suing the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to uncover the fraud, Nocera writes. If the SEC were liable for anything here, then taxpayers would be the ones paying Madoff victims. "This is not 9/11," he adds.
It's a pretty tough column saying all kinds of things that Madoff's former clients don't want to hear right now. They are responsible for their own financial gullibility. When something sounds too good to be true -- like the returns Madoff promised investors -- it probably is.
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Posted
Jul 21 2009, 11:36 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Wealthy New Yorkers who get sent to jail would have to foot the bill for their incarceration, according to a bill introduced Monday by a New York state legislator.
The "Madoff bill" -- named for disgraced financier and Ponzi-pusher Bernard Madoff -- forces drug dealers and other high-profile inmates to repay the state and federal governments for the cost of jailing them.
"Far too often, taxpayers are stuck with the bill for criminals who have extensive personal wealth waiting for them once they are discharged from our state's penal system," said the Republican assemblyman, Jim Tedisco, who introduced the bill, according to Reuters.
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