The $15.5 billion figure represents, in theory, 100 percent of the amount clients had invested, Mr. Cremades said, but excludes in almost all cases the bogus paper gains that were listed on investor statements.
To fool his investors and any regulators who happened to come sniffing around, Madoff built a Potemkin-like investment operation complete with traders at fake terminals pretending to buy and sell stocks and a bogus paper trail of transactions and accounting reports.
Paul Peters, president of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), three of whose 57 open access publisher members accepted the bogus paper, said the hoax was a "missed opportunity to do a more scientific study with a proper control group of subscription-based journals as well as more random sampling of open access journals that were chosen".
A bogus research paper reading only "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List" repeated over and over again was accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, an open-access academic journal, in November 2014.
The hoax, which was set up by John Bohannon, a science journalist at Harvard University, saw various versions of a bogus scientific paper being submitted to 304 open access journals worldwide over a period of 10 months.
Mr. Rodrigues said that Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui were his first tenants, and that they had provided him with fake identity papers and bogus pay slips to obtain a one-year lease.
By contrast, the apprentice professionals of college football and basketball -- who put in appearances in class and sometimes even file term papers, however bogus -- are like doctoral candidates.
On a day the new Homeland Security Department wanted to trumpet streamlined and tightened border inspections for travelers entering the United States, the agency had to explain why undercover investigators had been able to cross into the country using counterfeit identification papers and bogus names.
That month, Hwang publicly admitted that both Science papers were bogus, though he laid the blame on junior researchers.
