A recent Netflix documentary series called Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street by Emmy Award–winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger tells the story of the largest Ponzi scheme in history.
Besides the infamous character mentioned in its title, the series' other villain is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which received complaints about Bernie Madoff starting in the early 1990s, and yet, it not only failed to catch him but helped enable his fraud. During one investigation, all SEC investigators had to do was check an account number to verify trades had actually occurred, which they hadn't, of course, because all of Madoff's trades were fake.
