Madoff was extremely well connected, and numerous reports to the SEC were ignored as a result. His empire came down when he confessed to his sons, who immediately called the FBI.
FYI Madoff did have high-powered friends, and was never caught despite numerous tip offs. Madoff turned himself in when the GFC hit and his marks wanted their money.
Note that attestations are easy to fake: the article mentions the case of Tether
> Failing to complete an audit and settling on an attestation “for transparency”. The morning of the attestation, tether moved $380m from sister company bitfinex into a bank account to pass the verification
Illegal in crypto as well. https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8369-21
Compare to the capital ratios of your average bank, though.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/tether-first-reserve-composition-re...
If you want to kill Tether and Bitcoin, you don’t need to go after Tether directly or wait for some price drop. Subpoena all of the exchanges and ask for their commercial relationship with Tether to be documented, and for them to disclose all of their loan obligations, collateral and so on. But, your friendly politicians aren’t going to do that, because Coinbase and Binance and the others have locked up some very high powered lobbyists at this point. That’s where Madoff went wrong...
One of the craziest things is actually USDC — an attempt to replace Tether with a cleaned up, legitimate-looking version of the same nonsense.