Shocking fraud

The massive Madoff fraud had been on the news for the past few days. It has been described as a "Ponzi scheme of epic proportions" and as much as $50 billion could be lost.

Most of the news had been pinpointing Bernard Madoff who allegedly perpetrated the fraud.

But I had it hard to believe that only one person is involved in a massive fraud on such scale.

As Andy Serwer of Fortune Magazine said, "I say that for Madoff to perpetrate this fraud alone would have been next to impossible given the scale of the business."

Surely, those people who worked in Madoff would have figured out something was not quite right along the way. There had to be at least a few people highly placed enough to figure out what was going on even if Madoff had not said it out right that the whole thing was but a Ponzi scheme, such people who prepare the accounts and financial statements. Even if people could not figure out what was actually going on, some would surely detect that something suspicious was going on.

I think that for such a massive fraud to be possible, there must have been many other people who were either willing participants, or were inclined to look away from what would have been tell tale signs.

If the whole fraud were purely mastered mind and carried by Madoff alone, that would have been shocking indeed, for that seemed like quite an impossible feat. And if it were not, it must have involved many people, and it would be just as shocking as well. How is it that none of them had the conscience to ring the alarm bell? What happened to human conscience?