As a rational person, it's easy to think "I'd never be that stupid" when it comes to falling for scams promising an easy buck, but the sad fact is the world is full of people desperate to believe. Later today, former Wall Street trader Bernie Madoff - the man behind the world's biggest investment scam - will be sentenced for stealing up to $50 billion dollars over more than 20 years. Heavily stylised to imitate Hustle and narrated by one of the show's stars, Robert Vaughn, this slick documentary follows the son of Bill Foxton - a retired British army major who killed himself after losing his life savings in the scandal - as he travels America to find out what made Madoff tick.

The Madoff Hustle goes some way to disproving W.C Fields' words "You can't cheat an honest man", as Bill's son Willard Foxton talks to other victims and unravels the outrageous simplicity of the 'Ponzi scheme'. Madoff conned everyone from the jet-set to Jewish charities, promising modest returns as he pocketed their cash without investing it. Yet despite the awfulness of Madoff's fraud, and indeed the tragic fate of Bill Foxton, you were left feeling little empathy for many of the victims featured as they bemoaned the loss of their material possessions and personal fortunes.

There were some exceptions, of course, such as the 90-year-old forced to take a part-time job and the widow comforted by Madoff as he took her for every cent she had. Delving further into these stories would have conveyed the real human cost of Madoff's actions far more effectively than the excessive talk of hurried diamond auctions by millionaires looking to recoup their cash. And why was the fact regulators had dismissed an earlier report of the scam glossed over so quickly? Surely worth probing. As it was, the entertaining Hustle-style graphics and skin-deep interviews seemed if anything to trivialise the con, and by the end we were left no nearer to understanding what did actually make Madoff tick.