I just love stories about fraud. I love Shattered Glass. I’m halfway through The Dropout and I love it. (Yes, I know liberties are taken.) I really enjoyed Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room. Sometimes I even stoop to reading about the subject. I found this really interesting.
What are some stories, in whatever form (movie/novel/non-fiction) about fraud you like?
Two weeks ago a woman I know was planning her son’s 4th birthday party. The kid is into Spiderman, and his mom found a Spiderman costume, gently used, for sale online. She was going to get a friend to wear the costume and show up at her kid’s party! She arranged to meet the woman at a Sheetz convenience store/gas station to complete the purchase.
She arrived and the woman approached her, asked if she was there to purchase the costume. The seller went to her car and brought the costume over. It was perfect, professional quality, a real bargain.
As my friend was getting out her money, someone else comes running over, claiming that she was the buyer and was there to purchase the costume. The seller went back to her car to grab her notebook (taking the costume with her). She returns with some scribbled notes, apologizing, and said that both women had wanted to pay $50 and she couldn’t figure out who was the first.
The other woman then said she’d pay $60. My friend absolutely had to get this costume, so she went $75. The other woman said she only had $60, it wasn’t fair, her kid would be sad. The seller agreed to sell the costume to my friend for $75, and went back to her car to get the costume.
She came back from her car with the costume wrapped up and bagged securely. Money changed hands and my friend headed home. When she later untied the bags, she found an old dirty sheet.
I assume the two women at Sheetz were a team and probably sold the Spiderman costume several times that day.
I love that just about everything I know about the game Eve Online is reading about the massive scams people have pulled.
These guys pull all sorts of classic financial fraud, and keep getting away with it. But since the stakes are basically just fake game money, no one every really gets hurt.
Unless any victims used real money to buy virtual money.
“American Greed” is a show you might like. You can find it on cable, streaming, and various over-the-air channels. It’s a series of hour long shows about real life scams and frauds committed in the US:
The current fraud-de-jour seem to be selling NFTs / creating a crypto and then pulling the rug. My favorite one is the porn star that sold NFTs of herself and then ran off with the money when people were mean to her on Discord … except the wallets show the money was gone before the stream. Then the “investors” kept defending her even after the fraud was obvious. Her crypto should have been called SimpCoin.
“Bad Blood” (about the Theranos scam/debacle) is excellent.
There is a good documentary on Netflix about this fiasco of a festival: Fyre The Greatest Party that Never Happened.
And there is a pretty good (ymmv) called Inventing Anna about this woman who scams thousands and produces nothing. Interestingly she crosses paths with the people who organize the Fyre festival.
I swear, if we could just figure out why anyone ever thinks NFTs are a good “investment”, we could figure out what’s causing 90% of the world’s current problems.
When we have people spending millions of dollars to own a bit of otherwise worthless data, is it any surprise that people like Trump are still popular?
I enjoyed Conning Harvard:
If you like podcasts, the Wondery series “American Scandal” has some good ones. Particularly the series about Bernie Madoff.
Though not all of the seasons are about fraud.
Couple more fraudy podcasts that i liked:
Chamelon - Hollywood Con Queen
BBC - The Missing Cryptoqueen
The Philip Seymour Hoffman film Owning Mahowny is based on a true story of an embezzler at a Canadian Bank.
There’s the movie Catch Me If You Can (with Tom Hanks and Leo DiCaprio), of course.
Selling dirty sheets at Sheetz? Didn’t miss that.
On a smaller scale, selling elevator passes to underclassmen was a common fraud/prank when I was a teenager in the late 1970s. Each class seemed to think they had made it up - and in time, I found evidence of this going back to about 1950.
This school does have an elevator now, to comply with the ADA.
You’re behind the times. Yield farming is the new hotness.
Link to Bloomberg article - with two insiders explaining to a self-proclaimed cynical financial journalist that yes, there really is nothing behind the curtain.
If done carefully, it’s not even legally fraud …
Counterfeiter Emerich Juettner – aka Edward Mueller – whose story was turned into a movie starring Edmund Gwenn and was referenced in an episode of “Barney Miller”.
There is another Netflix documentary called The Tinder Swindler, about a guy that ran a ponzi scheme among several women he met online dating to live like a millionaire for years.
If you don’t hate Jack Black, The Polka King is a fictionalized based on a true story about a polka singer who ran a Ponzi scheme.
I read somewhere that the creators of the documentary may have been in on the original scam, and documenting the fiaso may have been part of the plan all along.