Fraudsters

So Bernard Madoff is going to be sentenced tomorrow and, it is supposed, he'll get so long in prison that he will die there (perhaps he should try the old alzeimer's-disease-scam, the one where it is pleaded that this model prisoner is suffering so much etc etc..... he gets out and soon recovers and - would you believe it? - sets up shop again). How is it, people ask, that your ordinary invester can be taken in by frauds like Madoff?
I knew a man who was taken in by fraudsters all the time. He'd see something in a newspaper or magazine, something which would offer to give him large profits for his investment and he'd fall for it; not in thousand of pounds but in hundreds. He'd say to me: "this company are making small statuettes out of silver which will increase in value by 100's of per cent in months...." I'd say "don't touch it." But he'd go ahead and after some time tell me "it hadn't worked out" - not he had lost an great deal of money but just that "it hadn't worked out".
He was a retired police officer.
Gamblers are the ordinary people who think they can win big time when they should know from experience that they can't. I knew a man who later became a school py0schyatrist who gambled all his money away and had to go back to being a quite lowly paid teacher from being a highly paid business man.
He became a Roman Catholic.
What amazes me is the gullibility of those who invest in certain charismatic men who not only should never be believed about anything but who also have a past record for fraudulent dealings. Robert Maxwell was someone who was marked by an investigative group of bankers as someone who should never be given money for further "businesses". However, soon he was back in business and the banks, as if their memories were short or as if they didn't have memories at all, opened their doors to him and said "come on in Bob, here's a couple of a million for you to start you off."
Somebody else's money of course.
As a writer in today's Telegraph says: with bankers it's never their money; with MP's it's never their money; with BBC executives it's never their money. It's tax payers money!