DENVER—When the phone call finally came, 55-year-old Robert Chew likened the revelation from the other end to “financial murder.”
Chew and his wife believed their $650,000 investment had grown to $1.2 million, but they learned last week it had all disappeared.
Until that call, the Chews, who live in Montrose in southwestern Colorado, didn’t even know the name of Bernard L. Madoff, the investor suspected of scamming them and others out of billions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. Chew said they never dealt directly with him.
“It was a great investment for decades for a lot of people,” Chew said Wednesday, but a feeling in the pit of his stomach told him the phone call would someday come.
“I think everyone who was in this probably wondered, ‘This is too good to be true,'” said Chew.
Madoff (MAY-doff) was arrested last week on charges of carrying out what prosecutors called a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that left investors around the world in financial ruin. He is free on $10 million bail.
Chew said his wife’s family may have lost $30 million. They had been in the investment plan for decades with what seemed like great success, he said, and they told him about it five years ago.
The fact that people thought for years that their money was growing made it an appealing opportunity, he said.
“We decided it was a pretty good, although risky, investment,” said Chew, a marketing consultant who moved from Los Angeles to Montrose two years ago. “Although we were given warnings, we thought, ‘This is as good as anything else.'”
Chew said he and his wife Sarah, 45, a personal chef, considered investing in real estate and had already lost some money in the stock market before settling on Madoff’s plan.
For years, the couple saw positive returns on their quarterly investment reports, and Chew said he shrugged off the uneasiness he felt about the investment’s secretiveness. “It was private, you didn’t know who was doing the trades or what the trades were,” he said.
Chew said he would hear about other people falling prey to other Ponzi schemes. “And you wonder if that’s your guy, but you never get the call,” he said. “And then the call comes.”
Last Thursday, his wife picked up the phone. It was the person in charge of the investment subgroup the Chews belonged to.
“Just me personally, (I) kind of wondered if that phone call would come,” Chew said. “But when my wife answered the phone and her words were, ‘You’re kidding. Is this a joke?’ And then her face dropped and I knew that was the call.”
“It’s a call I don’t wish on anybody,” he said.
Chew said he’s resigned himself to losing his money, and that he and his wife are determined to rebuild their retirement savings by building businesses or selling property.
More than any punishment Madoff may receive, Chew said, he hopes the incident will bring more government oversight over such investments.
“He’s probably going to go to jail for the rest of his life, but I don’t find solace in that,” he said.
