Charles Ponzi was an Italian swindler and con artist who operated in the U.S. and Canada. His aliases included Charles Ponci, Carlo, and Charles P. Bianchi.
A scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers have defined confidence tricks as "a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct ... intending to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial", as they "benefit con operators at the expense of their victims ". Some people consider a pyramid scheme to be a type of scam.
Quackery, often synonymous with health fraud, is the promotion of fraudulent or ignorant medical practices. A quack is a "fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" or "a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, knowledge, qualification or credentials they do not possess; a charlatan or snake oil salesman". The term quack is a clipped form of the archaic term quacksalver, from Dutch: kwakzalver a "hawker of salve". In the Middle Ages the term quack meant "shouting". The quacksalvers sold their wares at markets by shouting to gain attention.
Ivar Kreuger was a Swedish civil engineer, financier, entrepreneur and industrialist. In 1908, he co-founded the construction company Kreuger & Toll Byggnads AB, which specialized in new building techniques. By aggressive investments and innovative financial instruments, he built a global match and financial empire. Between the two world wars, he negotiated match monopolies with European, Central American and South American governments, and finally controlled between two thirds and three quarters of worldwide match production, becoming known as the "Match King".
Gustavus Katterfelto was a Prussian conjurer, scientific lecturer, and quack who travelled through Georgian England.
Mail fraud and wire fraud are terms used in the United States to describe the use of a physical or electronic mail system to defraud another, and are U.S. federal crimes. Jurisdiction is claimed by the federal government if the illegal activity crosses interstate or international borders.
Morris Fishbein was an American physician and editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) from 1924 to 1950.
Affinity fraud is a form of investment fraud in which the fraudster preys upon members of identifiable groups, such as religious or ethnic communities, language minorities, the elderly, or professional groups. The fraudsters who promote affinity scams frequently are – or successfully pretend to be – members of the group. They often enlist respected community or religious leaders from within the group to spread the word about the scheme, by convincing those people that a fraudulent investment is legitimate and worthwhile. Many times, those leaders become unwitting victims of the fraudster's ruse.
George Walter de la Warr was born in Northern England, and in later life became a civil engineer in the pay of Oxfordshire County Council. In 1953 he resigned from this post to work within the discredited field of radionics, in which he was a pioneer. His devices were denounced by medical experts.
Radionics—also called electromagnetic therapy (EMT) and the Abrams method—is a form of alternative medicine that claims that disease can be diagnosed and treated by applying electromagnetic radiation (EMR), such as radio waves, to the body from an electrically powered device. It is similar to magnet therapy, which also applies EMR to the body but uses a magnet that generates a static electromagnetic field.
Bernard Lawrence Madoff 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. He was at one time chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. 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.
American Greed is an American documentary television series on CNBC. The series focuses on cases of Ponzi schemes, embezzlement and other white collar crimes and features interviews with police investigators, fraud victims and sometimes fraudsters.
International Investment Group (IIG) is an American financial institution that specializes in short-term trade finance and commercial finance with a focus on emerging markets. Through its affiliate IIG Capital it provides financing to small and medium-sized merchants, traders and processors with a need for supply chain financing.
Leopold Koretz (1879–1925) was an American lawyer who ran an elaborate Ponzi scheme in Chicago, called the "Bayano oil fraud," which garnered an estimated $30 million from dozens of investors in Chicago. The scheme used fraudulent claims of oil interests in Panama in a criminal career that predated and outlasted his contemporary, Charles Ponzi. Koretz was so trusted and admired that after Ponzi's fraud was exposed in 1920, his investors nicknamed him "Our Ponzi," never suspecting they were being duped as well.
Frederick Darren Berg is an American entrepreneur, business executive, convicted Ponzi scheme operator, and prison escapee. He is the founder of MTR Western, a motorcoach operator headquartered in Seattle. He sold fraudulent investments through the Meridian Group, a group of investment companies, defrauding nearly 700 investors who lost almost $150 million, and he was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2012. He has been nicknamed "Mini Madoff" for his crimes' similarity to those of Bernie Madoff. Berg escaped from prison in 2017.
