Too Good To Be True

Fraud never lasts for long. And so it is that Bernard "Ponzi" Madoff was busted recently for defrauding a whole slew of not-so-bright people out of $50 billion or so.

The money quote:
"There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you've had somebody decide to be unscrupulous," said Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulator in charge of monitoring investment funds like the one Madoff operated.

Now, if these people were all that "very sophisticated", how is it they were so easily duped? Apparently, greed makes people do very stupid things.