Nothing dogs a good ponzi scheme like the death of a client. But for Bernie Madoff's henchman, all you had to was (allegedly) draw up a new account.
Bloomberg's Erik Larson was on the scene for the trial of Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi, two of Madoff's associates in his investment advisory unit. From Bloomberg:
While Madoff usually backdated trades to diminish payouts to the estates of clients who died, he couldn’t do that for Jacques Amsellem, a French customer since the late 1970s, because the man’s lawyer didn’t alert the firm to the death until two months later, Frank DiPascali, 57, testified today at the federal trial of five former colleagues in Manhattan.
Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi, defendants in the case who ran Madoff’s investment advisory unit, created a new account from scratch for Amsellem and filled it with losses on short positions for Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. to offset fake gains in his original accounts, [former associate Frank] DiPascali testified.
It's just that easy!