A newly-released transcript of a phone call between Bernard Madoff and a feeder hedge fund offers new details of how the arch-fraudster escaped detection for so long.

In a call with Fairfield Greenwich Group, which was facing a Securities and Exchange Commission inspection, Madoff offered tips on how to evade the regulator—strategies that apparently served him very well during his decades-long, $65 billion Ponzi scheme.

“You know, you don’t have to be too brilliant with these guys because you don’t have to be,” Madoff told the FFG employee, warning him that, “obviously, first of all, this call never took place.”

“You’re not supposed to have that knowledge and, you know, you wind up saying something which is either wrong, or, you know, it’s just not something you have to do.”

Later, Madoff calls the SEC inspection a fishing expedition and warns that appearance is everything in dealing with the regulator.

“You don’t want them to think you’re concerned about anything,” he advises. “You’re best off, you just be casual.”

The transcript was released by the Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, who this week struck a settlement deal with FFG. FFG, which lost more than $7 billion in the Madoff scandal, most of it in a single fund of hedge funds, agreed to pay $8 million in fines and restitution to Massachusetts investors.

“It’s an admission that basically Madoff knew it was a scam and it’s really how he conned the Securities and Exchange Commission,” William Galvin told the Associated Press.

The SEC inspectors “as a zillion different questions, and we look at them sometimes and we laugh, and we say, are you guys writing a book?” Madoff boasted. “These guys, they work for five years at the commission, then they become a compliance manager at a hedge fund now.”

Earlier this year, FFG, which has been inundated with lawsuits, gave up control of most of its remaining hedge funds.

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