Madoff's winners

This thread may expose my complete lack of understanding of the subject. From what I understand Madoff was using new contributions to his fund to pay off investors rather than the reported earnings which actually didn’t exist. The scheme fell apart when too many people got worried about the stock market and started to pull out of the fund. It collapsed because there wasn’t enough money available because all the profits were on paper and the money was never invested. How am I doing so far?

We have heard form many of those who lost their investment. Madoff was reporting profit to his investors for years. Presumably some people made money and cashed out. Is there any record of how many people made a real (not paper) profit from Madoff? Who got out with their investment plus the phony profit that was reported? How much money did he pay out over the years?

Don’t know how many people made profit but some did. I read that there is consideration being given to recouping some of that money from them. Can’t find where I read that it but they talk about it here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0455343e-e5c9-11dd-afe4-0000779fd2ac.html

The IRS may have been the biggest winner. The government collected taxes on all those paper profits for almost 20 years, when in fact, no investment ever occured, and no profits were actually earned. Victims may have some recourse, but for some, the statute of limitations will probably prevent them from filing for refunds on taxes paid before 2005.

We discussed this a couple of months ago here:

Legal position of investors in a Ponzi scheme who cashed out before its collapse?

What sort of records are Madoff likely to have kept? It was a complex, large operation. Can we trace who was in and out when?

This has puzzled me for weeks.

I missed that thread. Some interesting information about the liability of those investors that got out early. It doesn’t answer the question about how many people profitted or if any have been exposed or revealed themselves.