“In recent months, Ponzi schemes have become an even higher priority,” Khuzami said. “This is both because of the Madoff fraud and because the financial crisis has exposed so many Ponzi schemes. Ponzi schemes rely on a steady stream of cash from new investors to pay returns to old investors, but in a financial crisis, new investors cannot be found. So the scheme collapses.”

Enforcement officials say the dollar amounts involved in some of those cases would be eye-popping if they hadn’t been overshadowed by Madoff’s record-setting $65 billion scheme. “Years ago, a $20 million case was huge, now a $20 million case doesn’t even make the news,” Nanz said.

Here’s just a taste of some of the cases the SEC has acted upon this year:

In February, the SEC obtained an asset freeze against Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh of New York. The agency said the two ran a brazen investment fraud amounting to misappropriation of as much as $554 million in investor assets. The two told investors their money would be put into a stock-index arbitrage strategy. Instead, the two used investor money on homes, a horse farm and horses, luxury cars, and “rare collectibles such as Stieff teddy bears.”

In April, the SEC obtained an asset freeze to halt a scheme targeting members of the Chinese-American community, mainly around the Dallas area. The agency charged Weizhen Tang, who described himself as the Chinese Warren Buffett, with raising between $50 and $70 million for a Canadian hedge fund he controlled, and then operating a Ponzi scheme with the hedge fund since 2006.

In June, the SEC charged Peter C. Son and Jin K. Chung, both of Los Angeles, with luring approximately 500 investors in the U.S., South Korea, and Taiwan into investing in foreign currency trading. Except no trading took place with the approximately $80 million the two raised. They then used new money that came in to pay off old investors.

“There have been so many schemes in so many towns…they’re all over the place,” said Christopher Geczy, adjunct associate professor of finance and academic director of the Wharton Wealth Management Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Geczy said it was natural that a time of economic upheaval would bring Ponzi schemes crashing down, just as other businesses have crashed down.

“It’s in some sense a natural thing that Ponzi schemes become discovered,” he said. “They happen to coincide with periods of economic distress.”

But in the case of this year of the Ponzi bubble bursting, some other factors have been at play, he said. Investors are more wary because of all the publicity the Madoff case drew. And that made it harder for the con artists to draw them into their schemes.

“In fact, they were questioning a lot of things,” Geczy said.

It may well be the case that investors have gotten smarter, at least for the time being. But Nanz is under no illusions about Ponzi schemes, even if the current Ponzi bubble has burst. “I’m not expecting it to go away anytime soon,” said the FBI man.