Before watching this video about Bernard Madoff, I had no idea about this specific type of Ponzi scheme especially when it comes to anything of this great magnitude. According to the 60 Minutes CBS broadcaster Madoff was a former chairmen of the Nasdaq stock exchange who was accused by Harry Markopolos, whom was working at a Boston investment firm when his boss told him about the huge unregistered trust fund that was receiving good return. He was able to discover the scheme because of many red flags such as having a continuation of green days where it would not be correlate to the nature of the main indices, and he was able to prove it with a high degree of certainty through mathematical equations which proved that there simply wasn’t enough options on the Chicago listing exchange than actually existed. This along with many suspected reasons made it clear that there was something off about the entire fund even before there was any evidence of fraud, which only made it harder and complicated the trial. The victims of such a scheme is your average citizen who is looking for a source of income or a senior citizen investing for retirement, and this only made it worse because many of these people did not necessarily have the financial capacity to realize the seriousness of such a fund. In the video, Madoff was defending himself by claiming that it is impossible to commit fraud in the modern times and emphasized that he thinks that the Securities and Exchange Commission have been doing a great job with their investigation. It seems that much of the Madoff Ponzi scheme was able to succeed as a scandal by his trusted background and a much needed positive word of mouth about desired opportunities in financial gains. I feel like in many cases whenever there is an important discussion, any type of criticism is a good thing because even in the worst scenarios there always seems to be a heightened sense of covered even if there is a lot of criticism; in a sense, it was can still be able to bring in volume and attention which are critical as they bring in a much larger crowd at any given point. I relate this sort of attention to playing an important factor when it comes to attracting a new crowd which is necessary in order for these schemes to continue and flourish. Finally when it comes to the House Financial Services Subcommittee, representative and senators directed their criticism on the Security and Exchange Commission because they are the ones who initially lacked the research before claiming that there is no fraud. This means that these individuals are completely aware of the failures during the investigation that was supposed to take place on a professional level rather than refuse to respond on specific allegations because somebody else has or is willing to speak more information. In this case, criticism was directed with the hope that the SEC will be able to properly assess a situation without having to need information from anybody else considering it is within their reach to do so on their own behalf. 
