Bernard L. Madoff is facing life in prison for operating a vast Ponzi scheme that began at least 20 years ago and consumed billions of dollars of other people’s money.

While his fate will not be certain until he is sentenced, his lawyer told a federal judge on Tuesday that he intended to plead guilty on Thursday to all the criminal charges that federal prosecutors had filed against him  a list that could yield a prison sentence of 150 years.

Mr. Madoff was arrested Dec. 11 at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running what was perhaps the largest fraud in Wall Street’s history. The scheme zigzagged across the world, drawing in foreign banks, hedge funds, charities, celebrities and ordinary retirees who had entrusted their savings to his investment firm.

The charges, made public late Tuesday, offered a few fresh details about how Mr. Madoff conducted his long-running fraud. And they raised its price tag from his own estimate of $50 billion to nearly $65 billion, the total amount that thousands of customers were told they had in their accounts at his firm.