Madoff Victims Potentially Victims Again, Thanks To Laptop Theft

Once a victim of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, alway a victim of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, but even the people trying to figure out the victims' claims are messing up: A laptop containing "names, addresses, Social Security numbers and some Madoff account information on 2,246 investors" was stolen from a car.

Newsday reports that the car belonged to an employee at AlixPartners Llp, which is processing the victims' claims. The company's spokesman "said the laptop was password-protected and not targeted, but was taken in what Dallas police said was a 'smash and grab' series of thefts on one particular night at a parking lot." The theft occurred in July and the company doesn't think the investors' info was compromised, but still, it must have been great for victims to find out that their information was just sitting in a car for the taking.

In other Madoff victim news, the feds say about half (around 2,300 victims) actually lost money, while the other half lost nothing: "Most of the customers who had current accounts have made claims with the trustee, prosecutors wrote. Of those, nearly 50 percent had a net loss, meaning they contributed more funds to their accounts than they withdrew, while about half had no net loss because they withdrew more funds than they contributed." There's about $1 billion that's able to be distributed amongst victims—but it's unclear how much victims will get, because they are fighting the trustee over what a constitutes a "loss."