A $30-million Ponzi scheme on Bay Street

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The story of Toronto’s Bernie Madoff

UNFORGETTABLE SAGAS, SCOOPS AND SCANDALS
from Toronto Life’slong-form archives

APRIL 12, 2025

Dear reader,

This week’s stock market drama was as riveting and disturbing as an episode of HBO’s Industry. Donald Trump’s trade wars with everyone from China to uninhabited islands of penguins have thrown the markets into mayhem. On Monday, we saw the worst day on trading floors since Covid hit in March of 2020. By Wednesday, Trump had changed his mind about reciprocal tariffs, leading to the best day for the S&P 500 since 2008. Sure enough, come Friday, the charts were plummeting again.

The swings have been dizzying, and the dreaded R word is on everyone’s mind. But there are also more immediate dangers to look out for: economic turbulence creates the perfect conditions—a mix of greed and desperation—for investment scams. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a self-proclaimed financial guru on Bay Street promised investors sky-high returns, and they wholeheartedly believed him, begging him to keep trading even after they’d lost millions. Below, the story of Weizhen Tang: Toronto’s Bernie Madoff.

For more great long-reads from Toronto Life, subscribe to our print edition here.

—Madi Haslam, digital editor

The 1% Club

Weizhen Tang told his investors they deserved to be rich and only he could make them so. Even after he lost all their money and was charged with running one of the country’s largest Ponzi schemes, his disciples wanted him to keep trading

BY NICHOLAS STEIN | NOVEMBER 15, 2010

Weizhen Tang, a trader known in Chinese media as “Chinese Warren Buffet,” had lived in Toronto since the early 1990s. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Tang was accused of perpetrating one of the largest investment frauds in Canadian history: a Ponzi scheme involving up to 200 victims in Toronto, the United States and China. The trader’s improbable rise and public fall is a particularly egregious illustration of Canada’s flawed regulation of Bay Street and the investment gurus who earn their fortunes there. Years before his arrest, the Ontario Securities Commission was concerned about Tang’s activities but did little to stop him. In that time, his investors lost as much as $30 million.

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