If he had taken a better lawyer and fund manager, this wouldn't have happened.
If you tell someone you will invest their money, but you spend it on yourself, that's a crime.
Can you see the difference?
Or what’s your point?
That would make Warren Buffett is the biggest thief of all and has apparently stolen $487B from investors. Of course he hasn't spent their money, it's actually invested in hundreds of companies and investors can get their money back any time they want just by calling their broker.
But in your mind, it's the same as if he had stolen it. Because of "lawyers, accountants, and stuff".
Saying the Ponzi scheme guy is no different than a sleazy stock broker is massively trivializing his crimes. Sure, what happened to your parents is wrong, but it's far from what he did to his victims.
Where did Warren Buffet lose money unaccountably? Why are you shifting the goal posts, derailing a thread about personal liability for losses to talk about a successful investor?
I think you'll find that the attribute of "intrinsic motivation", which is what your argument boils down to, is not that clear cut (not even to the "fraudster") in reality.
This was to establish that the mere act of losing investor's money isn't fraud. And it's not a question of "intrinsic motivation", it's solely aa question of what they actually did.
Warren Buffett doesn't commit fraud because he tells his investors he's going to invest their money in equities, which has risk. If Berkshire Hathaway goes to zero because he made poor decisions, that's not fraud.
The ponzi scheme was fraud because he was paid to invest the money, but did not do that, instead he spent the money on himself and hid a bunch with his family. How hard is it to understand the difference between doing what you agree to do with someones money and stealing it?
Since it's holiday season, I'll give a more comprehensive answer with a literature recommendation: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull. I'm pretty sure you'll like it if you haven't read it yet. Also relevant would be Gottfried Keller's Kleider machen Leute (clothes make the man), a beautiful love story. Unfortunately it apparently has never been translated into English.