Bernie Madoff’s victims to receive final payout totaling $131 million
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(NEW YORK) — The fund disbursing money to the victims of Bernie Madoff’s legendary Ponzi scheme began its 10th and final distribution on Monday, putting another $131 million in the pockets of swindled investors.
Twenty-three thousand victims worldwide are receiving payments, bringing their total recoveries to 94% of their losses. Most of these victims were small investors who lost less than $500,000 in the fraud, according to federal prosecutors.
Since the collapse of Madoff’s investment house and his 2009 guilty plea, the Madoff Victim Fund has paid more than $4 billion to nearly 41,000 victims in 127 countries.
“This office has never stopped pursuing justice for victims of history’s largest Ponzi scheme,” acting U.S. Attorney Edward Y. Kim said.
For decades, Madoff used the investment advisory business he founded in 1960 to steal billions from his clients, turning his wealth management firm into the world’s largest Ponzi scheme to benefit himself, his family and select members of his inner circle.
He was sentenced to 150 years in prison, where he died in 2021.
“The unprecedented scope and complexity of the Madoff remission process shows the power of forfeiture to recover assets and to compensate victims,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brent Wible said in a statement on Monday.
(WASHINGTON) — TikTok on Monday requested the emergency pause of a law set to ban the popular social media app next month.
A temporary lifting of the measure would afford the Supreme Court time to determine whether it should review the law, the company said in a court filing.
The filling arrives days after TikTok — which boasts more than 170 million U.S. users — lost a challenge against the measure in a federal appeals court.
A pause of the law would afford the Supreme Court time to determine whether it should “review this exceptionally important case,” TikTok said in the court filing on Monday.
The law would impose a nationwide ban of TikTok on Jan. 19, 2025, unless the company finds a different owner.
The ban would take effect one day before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has signaled that he would seek to reverse a possible ban.
The legal pause would also allow the Trump administration an opportunity to decide its approach to TikTok, the company’s legal filing said.
TikTok had challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, arguing that a potential ban would deny American users access to a popular venue for public expression. Attorneys for the company also disputed claims that the app poses a national security risk.
In a ruling on Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s bid to overturn the law.
The federal court found merit in security concerns about potential data collection or content manipulation undertaken by the Chinese government.
Each of those two concerns “constitutes an independently compelling national security interest,” the court opinion said. The court cited previous instances in which the Chinese government had pursued data, noting the government’s use of relationships with Chinese-owned businesses.
The China-based app has faced growing scrutiny from government officials over fears that user data could fall into the possession of the Chinese government and the app could be weaponized by China to spread misinformation. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has denied those claims.
There is little evidence that TikTok has shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government or that the Chinese government has asked the app to do so, cybersecurity experts previously told ABC News.
In a statement on Monday, TikTok urged the Supreme Court to intervene on its behalf.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” the company said. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”
(NEW YORK) — The price of bitcoin surpassed $100,000 for the first time on Wednesday, soaring to a fresh high as the world’s largest cryptocurrency extended a rally set off by the election of former President Donald Trump.
Bitcoin has climbed more than 40% since Election Day, when voters opted for a candidate viewed as friendly toward digital currency.
Those gains have far outpaced the stock market. The S&P 500 has increased about 2.4% over that period, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq has jumped 2.6%.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to bolster the cryptocurrency sector and ease regulations enforced by the Biden administration. Trump also promised to establish the federal government’s first National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Trump said he would replace Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whom many crypto proponents dislike for what they perceive as a robust approach to crypto regulation.
Gensler announced that he plans to resign on Jan. 20, 2025, the date of Trump’s inauguration.
The post-election euphoria has lifted other parts of the crypto sector. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has climbed 27%. Lesser-known dogecoin has skyrocketed about 140%, while litecoin has surged 35%.
Shares of Coinbase, a top crypto trading platform, have increased more than 70% since Trump’s reelection.
The growth in recent weeks extends a remarkable turnabout for the once-beleaguered crypto industry. The sector entered this year bruised after a series of high-profile collapses and company scandals.
FTX, a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in November 2022. The implosion set off a 17-month legal saga that resulted in the conviction of Bankman-Fried for fraud. In April, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was sentenced to four months in prison in April after pleading guilty to charges that his platform had enabled illicit financial activity.
The reelection of Trump marks the latest in a series of positive developments that have buoyed cryptocurrency this year.
Those gains have been propelled, in part, by U.S. approval in January of bitcoin ETFs, or exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin ETFs allow investors to buy into an asset that tracks the price movement of bitcoin, while avoiding the inconvenience and risk of purchasing the crypto coin itself.
Last month, options on BlackRock’s popular iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) were made available for trading on the Nasdaq. The options, which provide a new avenue for bitcoin investors, allow individuals to commit to buy or sell the ETF at a given price by a specific date. While such investments typically come with additional risk, they can also make large payouts.
IBIT inched upward 1% on Friday, reaching a record high of about $56.
Bryan Armour, the director of passive strategies research at financial firm Morningstar, attributed the recent crypto surge to investors’ anticipation of friendly policy under Trump, as well as the newly available options trading for bitcoin ETFs.
Still, the performance of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, has proven volatile, Armour added. The price of bitcoin could fall, especially if Trump encounters difficulty following through on his campaign commitments, he said.
“As long as the narrative stays positive, there’s always room to grow,” Armour told ABC News before bitcoin reached $100,000. “I also think campaign promises don’t always come to fruition.”
“It’s still a highly volatile asset,” Armour added.
(NEW YORK) — A newly filed lawsuit has accused Subway of “unfair and deceptive trade practices” and selling its steak-and-cheese sandwiches based on “false and misleading advertisements,” that the lawsuit claims show customers getting at least three times more meat than is actually in the product.
The class-action complaint against Subway was filed on Monday in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York by plaintiff Anna Tollison, accusing Subway of using “photographs in its advertisements that make it appear that the Steak & Cheese sandwich contains at least 200% more meat than the actual sandwiches that customers receive,” according to the lawsuit.
“Subway’s advertisements for the Product are unfair and financially damaging to consumers as they are receiving a product that is materially lower in value than what is being represented,” the lawsuit says. “Subway actions are especially concerning now that inflation, food, and meat prices are very high and many consumers, especially lower income consumers, are struggling financially.”
The lawsuit also says that Subway’s promise of a portion that is larger is “causing consumers to come to, or order from, Subway restaurants and make purchases that they would not have otherwise made.”
The lawsuit says it stems from Tollison’s visit to a Subway in Jamaica, New York, on Aug. 23 when she picked up a steak-and-cheese sandwich after ordering it through Subway’s mobile app for $6.99 plus tax.
“After she picked up and began eating her sandwich, [Tollison] realized that there was barely any steak in the sandwich and that the photographs that she relied on were grossly misleading,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages for New Yorkers who bought the sandwiches in the last three years from Oct. 28, 2021 and alleges “egregious” violations of the state’s consumer protection laws.
This is not the first time Subway has dealt with lawsuits critical of their business. In 2021, Ireland’s Supreme Court issued a ruling declaring that for the purposes of tax law, the bread served in Subway’s hot sandwiches does not actually meet the legal definition of “bread” because of its sugar content and is rather a “confectionary or fancy baked good.”
In that case, Justice Donal O’Donnell in the Ireland Supreme Court said that the definition of “bread” was originally established to make a distinction between the starch in other baked goods, like cookies or cake or brownies, that are sugary and therefore not healthy enough to be considered essential foods.
“Subway’s bread is, of course, bread,” Subway said in a statement given to ABC News. “We have been baking fresh bread in our stores for more than three decades and our guests return each day for sandwiches made on bread that smells as good as it tastes.”
Subway also previously defended themselves against a lawsuit for more than four years claiming that their “footlong” sandwiches were too short. That case was dismissed in 2017.
