By providing tax relief to Madoff Ponzi victims, allowing them to go back as many as 10 years to recoup losses, Representative Kendrick Meek (D-Fla) has highlighted a major misconception about fraud.
All too many people believe that fraud only happens to the wealthy, that victims have money, otherwise, why would fraudsters target them.
The answer is, that while some fraudsters target one person with a million dollar scam, many fraudsters are successfully working the lower end of the spectrum, targeting tens of millions of people with $25,000 scams.
In fact, most Ponzi victims are middle-class families. Easy prey are widows and the elderly who put their trust the wrong person. A grand jury in New York recently indicted financial adviser for allegedly bilking 6,000 blue-collar construction workers out of their life savings. In South Florida, another Ponzi scammer stole $100 million from thousands of Haitian Americans with modest incomes.
Kendrick's bill is obviously aimed in large part at his own constituency. It has been reported that more than 2000 of Madoff's victims were Floridians.
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