On December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff was arrested and criminally charged with one of the biggest financial frauds in history — an audacious, long-running Ponzi scheme that resulted in tens of billions of dollars in lost investor funds. At the time, the scandal sparked a national conversation about the gross deficiencies of our country’s white-collar enforcement regime, but ever since the initial revelations about the problems at FTX and about Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal exposure, the Madoff case has resurfaced as a point of comparison for Bankman-Fried’s alleged misdeeds — and as a rallying cry for people who believe he should already have been locked up by U.S. prosecutors.
Bankman-Fried was asked about the comparison by Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos and (of course) rejected it, arguing that FTX was a “real business” in contrast to Madoff’s outright Ponzi scheme.
