Bernie Madoff might be close to an example; his scheme kept going for an _amazingly_ long time, and he made some effort at times to reduce inflow to keep it somewhat under control. There was probably a world in which it only came out after he died; as it was he was kind of unlucky with the timing.
Of course, there might be plenty of optimally greedy criminals out there, and you’ll never know; more or less by definition they do not get caught.
The best part of Bernie Madoff's grift, in my opinion, is that it follows the notion that "you can't cheat an honest man".
No one had any legitimate idea for how Bernie could beat the market by such an amount and so consistently, and yet they still invested. They must have thought that he was insider trading or suspected that it was a Ponzi. Roughly half his investors made money by cashing out, which is not something you'd usually do if you thought the fund was legitimate.
Bernie Madoff might be close to an example; his scheme kept going for an _amazingly_ long time, and he made some effort at times to reduce inflow to keep it somewhat under control. There was probably a world in which it only came out after he died; as it was he was kind of unlucky with the timing.
Of course, there might be plenty of optimally greedy criminals out there, and you’ll never know; more or less by definition they do not get caught.