Today is the deadline for victims of Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme to file a claim with the Securities Investor Protection Corp. [SIPC], the agency charged with protecting investors from Madoff’s failed investment business.

SIPC announced Wednesday it has set aside $231 million to cover the 543 qualifying claims. Each victim can collect up to $500,000 from the agency, but for many, their losses well exceed that limit.

Depending upon how much money is recovered from Madoff’s assets, victims could be entitled to as much as $2.74 billion in the future. On Thursday, U.S. Marshals confiscated Madoff’s Manhattan penthouse, worth nearly $7 million.

Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison on Monday. The board of prisons has estimated that Madoff’s release date would likely be Nov. 4, 2139, knocking off 20 years for good behavior.

Now that it is official that Madoff will spend the rest of his life in jail, prosecutors can go about the more complicated work of examining how the financier managed to evade regulators for decades.

An SEC investigator reportedly warned the agency about abnormalities at Madoff’s investment firm as early as 2004, but her complaints were not followed up on and she was assigned to pursue another investigation, according to a story in Thursday’s Washington Post.

According to the report, Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, an attorney who worked in the agency’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, sent her uncertainties about Madoff’s firm to her superiors, Mark Donohue and Eric Swanson, who worked as the branch chief and assistant director of the department, respectively. Swanson then married Madoff’s niece, Shana Madoff, in 2007. The inspector general is now examining the relationship between Madoff and Swanson, according to the Post.