I had a hard time relating to the victims of the Tinder Swindler except the girl that was tipped off and did something about it. I just had a hard time wrapping my head around giving him money like that (same with Bad Vegan). I understand helping out friend/boyfriend/family etc in an emergency but the amounts they gave him with very little question, at least at first, were insane to me for someone they had not known very long.
I don’t think it is technically fraud, but Michael Lewis’s book “Liar’s Poker” is a good look into the scummy antics of 1980s bond traders on Wall Street.
But that’s true of almost all these sorts of fraud. There’s a long history of people giving thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands to all sorts of con artists, and every time, I think, “How could they fall for something like that?”, and yet, it just keeps happening.
I agree. And it is not against the law to ask friends for money, which is why authorities had a hard time charging him with any crime. The fraudsters just have to live with themselves being horrible people, and most seem to be fine with that.
I was in a check-cashing shop and an older man was trying to get cash for (kind of) gold. His online girlfriend from Cameroon sent him a PDF showing his partial interest in a gold mine that he had purchased and he was getting frustrated that the check-casher was not accepting the piece of paper he printed up in exchange for real money.
Tania Head, the woman who claimed to be a 911 survivor. Turns out she wasn’t even in NYC that day.
And to this day, she still has defenders! It boggles the mind, it does! When you learn that…
I totally understand why you thought you needed to add this.
Word, I like him and I like the movie but I know he’s polarizing and if you don’t like him then this movie definitely is the kind of thing you don’t like. Caveat Emptor!
Fascinating.
A former co-worker of mine claimed that her boyfriend had been killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, necessitating lots of time off. She got caught out, and canned.
I’ve long imagined a situation on 9/11 where a man actually did work in the twin towers, but on that day, he told his wife he was going to work but really went to his girlfriend’s place in Jersey City. Then the wife assumes he’s dead. What does he do next, fess up or disappear? Someone should write up this treatment, and if it becomes a best-seller, please PM me for my address to send the check.
I had a friend many years ago, Nick, who was slowly dying of Hansen’s disease, that had also killed his non-identical twin brother. They had both spent many years in and out of hospital as their limbs degenerated, and eventually one of them died at the age of 26.
That might make it an awful lot more sympathetic that their Mum decided to pretend she’d won the UK National Lottery, several million quid, and live off everyone for about… two years, I think, before she got caught out? They lived in a really really nice flat, ordered posh furniture, went on expensive holidays, all because she had managed to fake a lottery win. I don’t know the details of how she managed to fake it. The short story is, she successfully faked a lottery win.
AFAIK, she didn’t rip off people she knew - she bought them expensive Christmas presents and basically lived the high life, only ripping off companies. Last time I saw my old friend they were buying everyone in the pub drinks, ordering everything they possibly could from catalogues (this was 1999), and they paid for us to get a cab home.
Her son was part of it after the fact - I know that he knew - but she did it in a way where he could pretend he wasn’t, and nobody really wanted to send him to prison.
She got a fairly long sentence, and I suppose that had to happen. I hope they allowed her out again to see Nick before he died. If life deals you a terrible hand, and then offers a royal flush under the table, you’re probably going to take it.
Mark William Hofmann forged rare documents with the dual goals of making money selling them, and discrediting the official history of the LDS church (in some cases, both). He was raised LDS but came to doubt and eventually despise it. He murdered three people to cover his crimes and is serving life in prison.
Interesting concept. How many people are going to seriously investigate a situation so extreme?
$8 million worth of antique books and parts of antique books stolen from the Carnegie Library and sold over 25 year span:
I dunno, that person was pretty squirrelly in other ways too, and I bet if the BF had really existed, she’d have still been fired for taking too much unauthorized time off. I have no idea how they caught her in the lie.
To add a more prominent case of real-life fraud, I submit Rita Crundwell, treasurer of a small town in Illinois, who defrauded them pretty much into the ground through a variety of pretty transparent fake-payroll schemes. Transparent enough nowadays, anyway, since she became a textbook case in anti-fraud education and policies. What I love about the story is that the town sued the hell out of their auditors, who’d blindly missed it all, and won.
There was a real case where the wife called the husband who was supposedly at work the WTC but he was really with his mistress. After they collapsed, the wife called the husband asking if he was ok. The husband not listening to the news (I wonder why) said Sure, why wouldn’t I be. I’m sure hijinks ensued.
I don’t think there was a real case. It was a joke that was going around right after the event which was itself a retelling of a much older joke.
I read about the Salad Oil Scandal in the Guiness Book of Records in the early 1970s.
Summary: A New Jersey vegetable oil company obtained $180 million in loans using a purported 1.8 billion pounds of soybean oil as collateral. In fact, they had only about one sixth of that amount. They filled docked ships with seawater and put just enough actual oil on top to fool inspectors.
An unexpected drop in soybean prices led to the fraud unraveling when investors tried to cash in.
What I find ingenious about the plan is that since vegetable oil floats on top of seawater, they could easily move the actual soybean oil from ship to ship for inspections.
I’ve always had a sneaking admiration for this guy.
My 11-year-old son and I just read Mark Twain’s short story “The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg.” A terrific deception that speaks to human foibles that resonate today.
(Not a true story, but the OP did mention “novels.”)