If you have a functional email, you must have received one of those mails. They tell you that a business associate or a wife or a husband or an uncle died and left millions of dollars. They ask that you provide your banking information into which they will wire the money. For doing so, they promise to give you as much as 40% of the money.

If you show interest, they will ask you for advance fees to settle government officials who are stopping the deal from going through. The actual money they make is from these advance fees. That is the criminal code under which the crime falls into. And in Nigeria, it is code 419. As a result, locally, the crime is referred to as 419 and those who participate in it are called the Yahoo Boys.

They have since modified the fraud. These days, it could come in the form of an email that says you have won an European lottery you did not play. It could be that you have won an award you did not apply for. Whatever disguise it comes in, the essential core of the plot is to lure you into desiring something you did not earn.

If you are not greedy, if you do not desire to reap where you did not sow, you are likely to be calm enough to think it through and notice that it is too good to be true. The rule of thumb is that if it is too good to be true, chances are that it is not true.

Cinderella, Snow white and a host of princesses and princes only live in cartoons and in children’s books. They have no physical addresses. Nobody in the real world lives happily ever after. Nobody. So anything that makes you feel you are going to live happily ever after is essentially false.

…Which brings me now to Bernard L. Madoff, the founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. This American original fraudster stole over $50 billion from investors using what is called ponzi scheme. He did that by simply offering them something that was too good to be true. It was an investment that virtually guaranteed that they would live happily ever after. Well, the news is, “no, you cannot.”

This man who was a former chairman of Nasdaq Stock Market stole more than all the yahoo boys of West Africa had stolen in all their years in fraud business.

Well, you can bet that somewhere in a deprived part of the world, some youths are studying what Madoff did. Before you know it, they will replicate it, repackage it, and modify it and bring it to the main street near you.

It is the way of the world- ponzi morality, ponzi politics, ponzi religion, ponzi finances. It is, after all, the globalization of fraud.