If an energy efficient consultant had audited Bernard Madoff’s operations he would have found an AS/400 running. Here is an interesting tidbit on the Madoff Ponzi scam.

An AS/400 was critical to Madoff's Ponzi scheme

Computers don't steal, investment bankers do

By Nick Farrell

Friday, 14 August 2009, 12:41

AN ANCIENT IBM AS/400 was crucial to US investment swindler Bernard Madoff's cunning Ponzi scam whereby he made off with huge wodges of other people's cash.

According to a new book, "Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff", author Erin Arvedlund claims that Madoff could not have managed his elaborate fraud without his old clunker of a mid-range computer system.

The IBM AS/400 was used by him and select other employees to print out fake account statements. What they would do was punch in fake trades on the IBM AS/400 and enter share prices that would square with his consistent but imaginary returns on the billions that customers entrusted to his firm.

Central to the scam was that "no one touched" the computer but Madoff. But that would have been a safe bet as no one would want to get their paws on an ancient AS/400 unless they were a real enthusiast.

As one of the founders of the NASDAQ stock exchange, Madoff was one of the pioneers of Wall Street trading technology. If he could make his IBM AS/400 lie to his clientele then we can see why he was so keen on computers.

If you find old energy efficient hardware running in your data center and you are suspicious why they won’t upgrade and retire the old hardware, there is a chance someone who just like Madoff wants to keep the hardware for their own personal gains and their career.

I wonder if IBM could have virtualized the AS/400 instance onto new hardware, but then more people would have access to the system. Madoff would have stopped that energy efficiency change.