Bernard Madoff, who ran a $65 billion Ponzi scheme from his Manhattan investment firm that ensnared nearly 37,000 victims, died at age 82 while serving his 150-year prison sentence.

Sources confirmed to multiple outlets that Madoff died; according to the AP's source, he passed away "at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural causes."

Madoff's decades-old scam was uncovered in December 2008, when he told his employees that the incredible returns offered to investors—as high as 46%— were "one big lie." The victims ranged from hedge funds and the owners of the Mets to people who wanted to see their nest eggs grow, many of them Jewish, including Holocaust survivors like Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

He managed to get away with the deception because he had staff fake trades and the Securities and Exchange Commission didn't ask too many questions. Madoff, who had a Park Avenue penthouse and a beach house in Montauk, confessed to federal investigators and was quickly put under house arrest. It's believed he took the fall in order to spare this two sons, Mark and Andrew, and brother Peter, who all worked at the firm, from being implicated in the fraud.

He pleaded guilty in 2009 to eleven criminal charges, including securities fraud, mail fraud, and investment adviser fraud. In a confession, he admitted:

The essence of my scheme was that I represented to clients and prospective clients who wished to open investment advisory and individual trading accounts with me that I would invest their money in shares of common stock, options and other securities of large well-known corporations, and upon request, would return to them their profits and principal. Those representations were false because for many years up and until I was arrested on December 11, 2008, I never invested those funds in the securities, as I had promised. Instead, those funds were deposited in a bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank. When clients wished to receive the profits they believed they had earned with me or to redeem their principal, I used the money in the Chase Manhattan bank account that belonged to them or other clients to pay the requested funds...

He also said, "I live in a tormented state now, knowing of all the pain and suffering that I have created. I have left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren."

One woman testified in court, "I have lost all of my life’s hard-earned savings. I have lost the home my husband and I had owned for 25 years because of this theft. I have lost the ability to care for myself in this old age."

While Madoff's defense lawyers asked for a 12-year sentence, federal Judge Denny Chin, who heard from many victims and their families, decided on 150 years, noting, "The symbolism of the sentence is very important." Madoff was sent to prison two weeks later, in July 2009.

In February 2020, Madoff's lawyers asked for him to be released from Butner federal prison on compassionate grounds, because he was dying from terminal kidney disease. "I’m terminally ill," Madoff told the Washington Post at the time. "There’s no cure for my type of disease. So, you know, I’ve served. I’ve served 11 years already, and, quite frankly, I’ve suffered through it."

By then, his wife Ruth had been living in "semi-isolation," and his two sons had died. Mark, 46, hanged himself in his Soho apartment in 2010, and Andrew, 48, died from lymphoma in 2014.

The request for early release was denied. Judge Chin said in 2011 that he found Madoff's actions were "extraordinarily evil" and that they "affect[ed] your general faith in humanity."