The list of investors who got fleeced by convicted felon Jordan Belfort, aka “The Wolf of Wall Street,” would be gold in the hands of financial crooks, and that’s why a federal judge in Brooklyn told the producers of “Inside Edition” in June that he wouldn’t hand it over to them.

“It’s pretty well known in the fraud world that the best list to get is the list of people who have already been taken,” Doug Shadel, an expert on fraud schemes and the elderly at AARP, told me in an interview.

In my story for The New York Times DealBook last month, I looked at the ways that financial criminals find and fleece their victims. You can read the story here.