ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the individuals who perpetrated the Ponzi schemes and characteristics about them that can be known from federal documents. It explores characteristics and theories about human behavior to try to understand how the perpetrators prey on others. Academic researchers have attempted to define and quantify psychopathological qualities in white-collar offenders. With any type of crime, psychological factors of the individual cannot be ruled out as a cause. The perpetrators demonstrated the first criterion by the consistency in unlawful behavior in that their schemes may have gone on for many years and are repeated on multiple victims. The Ponzi perpetrators are the experts in deceit of every possible kind; the methods of deception seem to be limitless and creative; this satisfies the second criterion. The perpetrators may have begun the scheme out of a debt from a gambling obsession, or began gambling the funds taken in from investor-victims; regardless they believed they would recoup their losses.
