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Nick Leeson, English trader whose unsupervised speculative trading caused the collapse of Barings Bank [ 43] James Paul Lewis, Jr., ran one of the biggest ($311 million) and longest running Ponzi schemes (20 years) in U.S. history [ 44] Victor Lustig, con artist known as "the man who sold the Eiffel Tower ".
Bernard Lawrence Madoff ( / ˈmeɪdɔːf / MAY-dawf; [ 2] April 29, 1938 – April 14, 2021) was an American financial criminal and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, worth an estimated $65 billion. [ 3][ 4] He was at one time chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. [ 5]
John E.W. Keely (1837–1898): American mechanic and carnival barker who claimed to have discovered a new "force" on the likes of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and bilked investors and socialites until the day of his death. [ 10][ 11] David Lamar (1877–1934): American con artist known as "The Wolf of Wall Street".
America has a rich history of financial fraudsters, with the past two decades particularly rife with enigmatic figures that have gripped the public’s attention. Bankman-Fried’s innocence may ...
Tania Head had one of the most harrowing accounts from 9/11 and eventually became the president of a survivor's network, but the Spanish woman was ultimately proved to be a fraud and wasn't even ...
1860s. Jacob Young, William Abrams, and Nancy Clem ran what author Wendy Gamber argues, in her book The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age, was the first-ever Ponzi scheme. [ 1][ 2] In Munich, Germany, Adele Spitzeder founded the "Spitzedersche Privatbank" in 1869, promising an interest rate of 10 percent per month.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. [1] In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
He agreed to forfeit $3.18 million in accounting fees and withdrawals from his account with Madoff. His involvement makes the Madoff scheme not only the largest Ponzi scheme ever uncovered, but the largest accounting fraud in world history. [126] The $64.8 billion claimed to be in Madoff accounts dwarfed the $11 billion fraud at WorldCom.