Bernie Madoff, mastermind of the worst financial scam in history, has died in prison at age 82, reported AFP quoting US media reported. In 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison for running a pyramid-style scheme that defrauded tens of thousands of people around the world. The scheme was estimated to be worth anywhere between $25 billion and $63 billion.

The list of Madoff’s victims includes film director Steven Spielberg’s charitable foundation, Wunderkinder, according to BBC.

“We can confirm Bernard Madoff passed away on April 14, 2021, at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner, North Carolina,” an official with the federal Bureau of Prisons told AFP in an email.

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His cause of death is yet to be ascertained by a medical examiner.

Madoff’s lawyer in February 2020 had appealed to court to release the disgraced Wall Street financier as he was terminally ill and wanted to leave prison to die.

His attorney Brandon Sample had said that Madoff was suffering from “terminal kidney disease.”

“The Bureau of Prisons concluded in September 2019 that Madoff has less than 18 months to live because of the terminal nature of his kidney failure,” Sample wrote.

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He wanted to mend fences with his grandchildren and die at home but the request was rejected by the prisons bureau.

“I’ve served 11 years already, and, quite frankly, I’ve suffered through it,” Madoff told the paper in an interview.

A pyramid, or Ponzi, scheme is a form of fraud in which returns on investments are generated only by bringing in fresh investments from new victims. Cash from new clients is used to pay existing clients until the scheme eventually collapses.

Madoff’s fraud was revealed during the financial crisis in 2008 when he was unable to satisfy growing client demands to withdraw their investments, and many lost their savings or were unable to retire.

New Yorker Madoff never invested a single cent of the money the scheme’s clients trusted him with, instead using money from new investors to pay older ones.

US authorities have seized about $4 billion related to Madoff and aim to return it to tens of thousands of his victims around the world.

The Madoff Victim Fund will disburse payments to more than 30,000 people around the world who were cheated out of their investments by the crooked financier between the 1970s and 2000s, the US Justice department has said.