50 Fun Facts About Fraud and Famous Scams

Which European landmark did con man Victor Lustig 'sell' to a scrap metal dealer in 1925?

The Eiffel Tower was 'for sale' because Lustig posed as a ministry official and claimed Paris could no longer afford its upkeep. His mark, André Poisson, even paid him a bribe to win the deal.

Malaysian investigators alleged that money stolen from the 1MDB state fund financed which Martin Scorsese film?

The Wolf of Wall Street, a film about a stock swindler, was itself allegedly paid for with looted public money. Its producer Riza Aziz was arrested in Malaysia in 2019.

Which country's basketball team lost a 2000 Paralympic title after a journalist exposed players with no disability?

Spain entered the intellectual-disability tournament with a squad that included reporter Carlos Ribagorda, who then revealed that most of his teammates had never been medically tested.

Which pop duo lost the 1990 Best New Artist Grammy after other singers were revealed to have made the records?

Milli Vanilli were two dancers who lip-synced to session vocalists hired by their producer. He fired them and confirmed the secret days before the award was taken back.

An ex-policeman known as 'Uncle Jerry' stole winning pieces from which fast-food chain's Monopoly game?

McDonald's had outsourced the game to a marketing firm whose security chief, Jerome Jacobson, passed the top pieces to friends, family and a mob associate until the scam was uncovered in 2001.

How did a fellow contestant signal answers to Major Charles Ingram on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Coughing from contestant Tecwen Whittock lined up with Ingram's correct answers, the production team noticed. Ingram reached the £1 million jackpot in 2001 but was never paid, and was convicted in 2003.

Charles Ponzi promised investors 50% profit in 45 days by trading which international postal item?

Reply coupons bought cheaply in Italy could be swapped for pricier US stamps, a real loophole. In practice Ponzi simply paid earlier investors with the money of later ones.

Convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli had to forfeit a one-of-a-kind album recorded by which hip-hop group?

Wu-Tang Clan made only one copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which Shkreli bought at auction in 2015. A federal court seized it after his securities fraud conviction.

Which 'missing link' fossil announced in England in 1912 was really a human skull with an orangutan jaw?

Piltdown Man was accepted by many scientists for four decades. Tests in 1953 exposed the Sussex find as a forgery that paired a medieval human skull with the 500-year-old jaw of an orangutan.

Con man George C. Parker repeatedly 'sold' which New York landmark to newly arrived immigrants?

Brooklyn Bridge sales were Parker's signature scam, and he also offered Grant's Tomb while posing as the general's grandson. He died serving a life sentence in Sing Sing.

Which stock exchange did Bernie Madoff once chair, long before his Ponzi scheme earned him a 150-year sentence?

Nasdaq grew out of electronic trading technology that Madoff's own firm helped to develop. His 2009 prison term was the maximum the judge could impose.

Which blood-testing startup did Elizabeth Holmes found at 19 while she was a Stanford undergraduate?

Theranos peaked at a $9 billion valuation on the false claim that its compact machines could run accurate tests on a few drops of blood. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in 2022.

Which rapper organised the disastrous 2017 Fyre Festival in the Bahamas with entrepreneur Billy McFarland?

Ja Rule helped sell a luxury island weekend that delivered packaged sandwiches and rain-soaked tents instead of gourmet meals and villas. McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison.

Which 2022 drama series cast Julia Garner as the fake heiress who conned New York under the surname Delvey?

Inventing Anna was created by Shonda Rhimes from a New York magazine article about Anna Sorokin, a Russian-born fraudster who posed as a wealthy socialite.

Advance-fee email scams are nicknamed '419' after the fraud section of which country's criminal code?

Nigeria also gave the scam its 'prince' nickname: the victim pays fees up front in the hope of a fortune that never arrives.

In 1983 Stern magazine paid millions for sixty forged diaries supposedly written by which historical figure?

Adolf Hitler's supposed journals were written by forger Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. Kujau and the Stern reporter who bought them both went to prison.

Which con man's tales of posing as a Pan Am pilot and doctor inspired the film Catch Me If You Can?

Frank Abagnale was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 film. A later investigation of public records concluded that most of his claimed criminal career was itself made up.

Which carmaker admitted in 2015 that 11 million diesel cars carried software built to cheat emissions tests?

Volkswagen's 'defeat device' kept engines within pollution limits only while they were being tested. The company pleaded guilty to US criminal charges in 2017.

Which US bank was fined $185 million in 2016 after staff opened millions of accounts without customers' consent?

Wells Fargo staff were chasing aggressive internal sales goals, and created about 1.5 million deposit accounts and more than half a million credit cards that nobody had requested.

Author Clifford Irving went to prison for faking the 'autobiography' of which reclusive billionaire?

Howard Hughes broke years of silence with a televised telephone conference to say he had never even met Irving. The author confessed and served 17 months.

Which accounting giant collapsed in 2002 after being convicted of shredding documents from the Enron audit?

Arthur Andersen gave up its licences to practise within weeks of the verdict. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction three years later, far too late to save the firm.

Rogue trader Nick Leeson's hidden losses in Singapore brought down which historic British merchant bank in 1995?

Barings was Britain's oldest merchant bank when Leeson's unauthorised bets sank it. He was convicted in a Singapore court and served more than four years in Changi Prison.

Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison after the 2022 collapse of which cryptocurrency exchange?

FTX was only founded in 2019 and filed for bankruptcy in November 2022. Its founder was arrested in the Bahamas a month later and ordered to forfeit $11 billion.

Simon Leviev allegedly posed as a diamond mogul's son to borrow fortunes from women he met on which app?

Tinder gave the 2022 Netflix documentary about him its title, and three of the women tell the story on screen. Born Shimon Hayut, he took the surname of a real diamond billionaire.

Rosie Ruiz was stripped of her 1980 win in which race after officials found she had not run the whole course?

Boston Marathon officials took back her title eight days after the race. Her qualifying run in New York was annulled too, after a photographer recalled meeting her on the subway mid-race.

Dutch forger Han van Meegeren fooled Nazi leader Hermann Göring with a fake painting by which Old Master?

Vermeer fakes saved their maker: accused of handing Dutch cultural property to the enemy, he proved the canvas was his own work, the charge was dropped and he became a national hero.

Cassie Chadwick borrowed millions from American banks around 1900 by posing as which tycoon's illegitimate daughter?

Andrew Carnegie's supposed heiress was really Elizabeth Bigley, a Canadian with an earlier forgery conviction. She had a lawyer take her to the industrialist's New York home to seed the story.

Lou Pearlman, later jailed for a huge Ponzi scheme, created which boy band before launching NSYNC?

Backstreet Boys were five unknowns chosen by Pearlman in a $3 million talent search. He turned the fame of his groups into the engine of a scheme that left over $300 million in debts.

Barry Minkow's ZZZZ Best, founded in high school and floated in 1986 on forged contracts, was in which line of business?

Carpet cleaning was the real trade, but most reported revenue came from insurance restoration jobs that existed only on forged paperwork. The accountant who audited it before the float never visited the sites.

Which Munich-based payments company filed for insolvency in 2020 after revealing that €1.9 billion was 'missing'?

Wirecard had been promoted to the DAX index of leading German companies only two years earlier. Its chief executive was arrested, while operations chief Jan Marsalek fled to Belarus.

What name is given to fake emails that imitate a trusted organisation to trick people into revealing passwords?

Phishing was first documented on AOL in 1995, and the word reached print by 1997. A version aimed at senior decision-makers is known as whaling.

Which securities fraud involves hyping a cheaply bought stock with false claims, then selling once the price jumps?

Pump and dump schemes favour thinly traded 'penny stocks', because little independent information exists to contradict the hype spread by spam emails and boiler-room callers.

Which offence means dishonestly taking money or property that the offender had been lawfully entrusted to look after?

Embezzlement differs from ordinary larceny because the offender starts with legitimate access to the assets, as a cashier, trustee or company treasurer does.

Donald Cressey's 'fraud triangle' says fraud needs financial pressure, opportunity and which third ingredient?

Rationalization lets offenders square the act with their own conscience. Cressey drew the model from research on people he called 'trust violators'.

Sociologist Edwin Sutherland coined which term in 1939 for crimes committed by respectable people in their jobs?

White-collar crime covers financially motivated, nonviolent offences such as bribery, insider trading and forgery. Sutherland's definition stressed the offender's high social status.

Which 2002 US law, passed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, makes top executives personally certify accounts?

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, usually shortened to SOX, is named after its two sponsors in Congress. Countries from Canada to Japan went on to pass similar laws.

Fraud investigators test suspect accounts against which principle, under which about 30% of real numbers begin with 1?

Benford's law predicts that 9 leads fewer than 5% of the time, whereas evenly spread digits would each lead about 11%, which is why invented figures can stand out.

The 2019 bribery case involving actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin exposed fraud in what?

College admissions were rigged by consultant Rick Singer, who took more than $25 million from parents to inflate exam scores and bribe officials. The FBI code-named its investigation Operation Varsity Blues, after a 1999 film.

A 1963 scandal that cost American Express dearly involved tanks said to be full of what but mostly holding water?

Salad oil was so scarce in the tanks that one company claimed to hold more vegetable oil than existed in the entire nation. Hidden compartments fooled the warehouse inspectors.

Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger lent money to governments in the 1920s in return for national monopolies on what?

Matches made Kreuger the 'Match King', controlling up to three quarters of world production. After his death in 1932, auditors found book-keeping tricks they described as childish.

Which talk-show host told author James Frey on air that he had betrayed millions of readers with a fabricated memoir?

Oprah Winfrey had made A Million Little Pieces a bestseller through her book club in 2005. A website's six-week investigation then showed that crucial parts of it were made up.

Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke gave back which award in 1981 after her story of a child addict proved invented?

The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing went to 'Jimmy's World', a profile of an eight-year-old who did not exist. The paper's own Bob Woodward had submitted the story for the award.

Which medical journal retracted Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism?

The Lancet withdrew the paper in 2010 after a Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer. Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register three months later.

Impostor Ferdinand Demara, with no medical training, served as ship's doctor on a Canadian destroyer in which conflict?

Korean War service aboard HMCS Cayuga became his most famous exploit: he had taken the identity of a real surgeon, Joseph Cyr. Tony Curtis played him in the film The Great Impostor.

Canadian miner Bre-X collapsed in 1997 when a vast Indonesian deposit of which metal turned out to be faked?

Gold had been 'salted' into the rock samples, and the mine held hardly any. An estimated 40,000 investors lost their entire stakes in the company.

Which Balkan country fell into armed revolt in 1997 when pyramid schemes worth nearly half of national GDP collapsed?

Albania saw almost two thirds of its population put money into the schemes, which promised sure returns in a newly post-communist economy with little regulation.

Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford, jailed for 110 years, bankrolled a $20 million winner-takes-all contest in which sport?

Cricket was his showcase: Stanford built his own ground in Antigua and signed a 2008 deal for England to play his West Indies all-star side for the money.

Radio quack John R. Brinkley won fame and fortune by transplanting the testicles of which animal into human patients?

Goats were said to be the healthiest animals at the meat plant where Brinkley once worked, which gave him the idea. He went on to pioneer high-powered 'border blaster' radio from Mexico.

Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor sold bonds and land in the 1820s for which invented Central American country?

Poyais existed only on paper, yet about 250 settlers sailed for it in 1822 and 1823. They found untouched jungle in Honduras, and more than half of them died.

Trader Jérôme Kerviel's unauthorised bets of up to €49.9 billion were uncovered in 2008 at which French bank?

Société Générale said his hidden positions were worth far more than the bank's entire market value. Kerviel was found guilty in 2010 and given five years in prison, two of them suspended.