Reuters:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Long Island man was sentenced to 25 years in prison Friday after admitting to stealing more than $195 million from thousands of investors in the course of a five-year, $400-million Ponzi scheme.
Nicholas Cosmo, 40, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley to repay $179 million to more than 4,000 investors who thought they were investing in short-term commercial bridge loans through Cosmo’s two Long Island-based companies, Agape World Inc and Agape Merchant Advance.
Instead, prosecutors said, Cosmo used new investments to pay returns to investors, in a classic Ponzi structure. Media accounts dubbed Cosmo a “mini-Madoff” following his arrest in January 2009, because of the similarity of his scheme to that of New York investment manager Bernard Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar swindle, which had been discovered only weeks earlier.
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