Actor Kevin Bacon is not many degrees of separation from infamous fraudster Bernie Madoff. On an episode of the SmartLess podcast, hosted by Jason Batemen, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes, Bacon described how he and his wife Kyra Sedgwick lost a large sum to Madoff’s pyramid scheme.
“We had most of our money in Madoff,” he said.
Bacon added that he was angry about the fallout of his investment, but that he and Sedgwick also had a reflection period. “When something like that happens, you look at each other and you go, ‘Well, that sucks, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.’”
Madoff ran the largest Ponzi scheme ever recorded, a fraudulent venture that targeted as many as 37,000 individuals over the course of 40 years and eventually stole $65 billion in total.
In hindsight, red flags are often prevalent with any fraudulent scheme. “The financial mechanisms behind the con man’s moneymaking scheme are always secret or hard to verify,” professor and author Tamar Frankel told Fortune. “There is always a smell of illegality, persistent but subtle enough that people are willing to overlook it in order to get at the financial returns.”
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme is structurally different from a pyramid scheme in that it’s more about investment than involvement. But pyramid schemes have a similar gut feeling that something is wrong, which is often overlooked due to optimism or simply being down on one’s luck. And then there’s…
