Getting rich on Ponzi

US: Ponzi schemes may have recently lost investors a lot of money, but one man's meat is another man's poison. Business is now booming for asset-forfeiture experts, those people employed to find out where a fraudster has hidden his money (for example in houses, boats or other assets) and to return it to the victims.

Reports of Ponzi cases have tripled in the last past year, according to Business Week. The most spectacular has been that of American Bernard Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme recently landed him with a 150 year jail sentence.

Business is booming for those people employed to find out where a fraudster has hidden his money

Many asset hunters in the US learned their trade decades ago at the height of the drug wars. Miami lawyer Michael Diaz Jr, for example, learned his skills on the streets of Miami in the 1980s. He has now been asked to track the assets of a Canadian real estate developer who defrauded US investors of $170 million in a recent Ponzi scheme.

But business doesn’t only come from the victims of crime. According to Charles A. Intriago, who heads AssetForfeitureWatch, a consultant to the Miami police, some fraudsters also hire asset hunters to protect their assets. For experienced financial crooks, “there’s a 99.9% chance that the dirty gains won’t be confiscated,” he says.