I always imagine large scale financial fraud as something requiring a great amount of financial expertise. Seeing this code snippet is surreal.
the reality of it boiled down to “Madoff was too big and important for anyone to dare question”.
Yes, the fraud itself was extremely simple, but I also highly doubt that a random noname like SBF could have pulled that off at the time. You really had to be someone. Someone the SEC didn’t want to touch.