I mentioned in my first blog that I had a first hand knowledge about someone stealing a persons life savings. It shows that you need to make sure who has access to your funds. A gentleman that lived across the street from me had a very traumatizing experience with this such matter. He previously owned a business and sold it after a number of years for a plentiful profit. He knew he had the money he wanted for retirement but put it in the hands of a money manager to try and make the dollars grow a little. Next thing he knows every dime of his life savings is gone and the money manager is nowhere to be found. He may lose his house and cars because now he just needs money to get by on the bare minimum, not for a nice happy retirement like he thought. This is the kind of thing that can happen to the normal everyday citizen, it just does not get the media attention that Mr. Bernie Madoff is getting right now. How sad for this to happen to someone who put trust into someone to make his money grow and then they did a magic act and disappeared. The whole basis of this blog is either don't put your money somewhere other than a bank or make sure you trust them with your life, which in some cases wont be enough.I mentioned the name Bernie Madoff and that is who I would like to talk about. He has been all over the news for the amount of money he swindled from a vast array of celebrities. It is said that the total amount swindled could be 50 million. That is an insane amount of money. I saw a segment on 20/20 about Madoff and all the celebrities he took for a ringer, some losing as much as 250 million to this fraud. That is so much money I wonder why people would take a risk in investing it and possibly losing money. That is way more than you need for a lifetime, so why do these people continue to try for more, is it greed or an addiction for more wealth? This is a good question and one that cannot be answered easily. One person on the 20/20 mentioned that some people like Steven Spielberg lost 50 million or so but still has more than enough left for his life. It is the people that lost every dime of their life savings that really hurts. Like this family that I read about in Time magazine. They lost about 1.2 million on paper and other members of their family lost almost 30 million, this is just a sad thing to see that people may actually commit suicide over events like this. People losing their lives savings to a crook who just wanted every ones money for himself. I have a feed to the Time Magazine article at the bottom, feel free to read what happened to one family in result of Bernie Madoff's fraud. To take advantage of innocent people is terrible and that is why white collar crime needs to be looked at more and more these days, it seems to be ever increasing. I have a video of a show on CNBC that talks about Madoff and what many are calling "the scam of the century."
I can't believe people actually fall for this stuff. I would never trust any one with my money. It's stuff like this that's made me feel this way. There is just too many people losing their entire savings for me to feel like I could trust any one. What type of creep would be capable of doing such a thing? Things like this need to be more public. People need to be aware of the danger lurking in the corporate world. Just because someone has a degree, suit and nice office doesn't mean you should trust them!
ReplyDeleteYes this is a terrible thing, but it is happening everywhere especially with economic recession going on right now. I totally agree with you people that look professional may be crooks, the suits and nice clothes do not make them trustworthy. It is sad to hear about all these peopole getting scammed. I would never trust someone with my money it is just way too risky!
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