Reports that Bernie Madoff may be close to a plea deal with federal prosecutors may mean no trial and no messy public display of sham investment documents—only a messy, more private restitution to victims. But it may bring an early close to one of the biggest shams of this whole story, the idea that this was “a $50 billion fraud.” The moral: We should be ashamed for having echoed that number these past months.

Despite being repeated thousands of times in public domain, the $50 billion number has a single source, and we got it fourth-hand. Madoff uttered the fantastical figure to “senior employees No. 1 and No. 2” (since identified as his sons) the day before his arrest. Not, to be clear, to any law enforcement authority. Madoff’s sons told the investigating FBI agent of the statement, which was then captured in the criminal complaint. Given the stress behind an impending indictment and Madoff’s lonely difficulty in keeping so many sets of books separate (if the allegations are to be believed), you can imagine how he might, at the 11th hour, descend to both hyperbole and simple error. There is a bureaucratic banality to Madoff’s (alleged) particular brand of evil, and until we’ve seen the books, we can’t take him at his initial word.

We also don’t have anything approximating a reckoning of the Madoff investments from either side. The Madoff books, of course, are being pored over by prosecutors. What about those who sank their assets into his funds?

We have a list of alleged Madoff victims, and it’s impressive indeed, running 162 pages. But there was never a dollar amount of initial investment (or known loss) associated with any of those names. No complete reckoning of the list was ever done by a media outlet, and it would’ve been a task that makes tracking that bailout look like a cakewalk (Update, 4:30 p.m. ET: we found one done by Bloomberg in January, compiled from media reports, in which the (self-declared) collective exposure was $41 billion). The biggest amount invested in Madoff-related vehicles and attributed to one investor to date has been Fairfield Greenwich’s $7.5 billion. Meanwhile, the court-appointed trustee has received claims totaling only around $1 billion, according to the latest reports. And until we know where some of those assets have gone, we can’t assume that they have all been reduced to nil.