Lou Pearlman

In 2006, Lou Pearlman, the man behind such boy bands as Backstreet Boys and N’Sync, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the largest ever Ponzi scheme - for more than 20 years Pearlman enticed individuals and banks to invest in Transcontinental Airlines Travel Services Inc. and Transcontinental Airlines Inc., which existed only on paper.  Now federal authorities are ordering Pearlman to pay a hefty sum of $300 million to the individuals and banks that he ripped off.

How he plans to pay off this mammoth debt is a mystery that will only reveal itself with time and quite a handful of prison jobs.  According to Yahoo! News:

“It will be difficult for Pearlman to repay all the money while he is behind bars. Pearlman made millions in the record industry in the 1990s, but investigators have found that money and more seemingly gone with the collapse of his Ponzi scheme…He’s been allowed to manage — at arm’s length — the few remaining music acts he still has. He could also offer wages from whatever job he gets in federal prison, ranging from 12 cents an hour to $1.15 an hour for top-scale factory work.”

I’m no CPA, but I just plugged $1.15/hr X 40 hrs/week X however many years this guy has left into the portion of my brain that does mind math and I did not come up with $300 million. 

Above is a picture of Lou in happier times, looking like he maybe swallowed the 3rd, 4th, and 5th members of N’Sync (the first and second being Justin Timberlake and Lance Bass, of course).