Made famous thanks to his portrayal by Leonardo Di Caprio in Steven Spielberg's film "Catch me if you can", Frank Abagnale was a genius imposter. A fraudster so good he converted to anti-fraud !

An American company specializing in the production and transportation of gas, Enron, was founded in 1985 by Kenneth Lay, a former member of the Reagan administration and friend to Republican Party heavyweights like Bush, father and son. In the 1990s, deregulation of the energy market led Enron to become an energy broker. The company offered complex financial products to its clients, and it was a period of intense trading. Carried away in its momentum, the firm expanded into raw materials and telecommunication by selling bandwidth for example. Between 1995 and 2000, its turnover increased from 10 to 100 billion dollars !

On April 14th, 2021, in the federal prison of Butner, North Carolina, an 82-year-old inmate died. This man was Bernard Madoff, one of the biggest swindlers in history, the mastermind of the most elaborate Ponzi scheme. The businessman was at the head of one of the main investment companies on Wall Street when he was arrested in 2008. His "pyramid" represented a volume of nearly 65 billion dollars...

We often hear the term Ponzi scheme without knowing exactly where it comes from. A Ponzi scheme - named after the man who invented it in 1920s Boston - is a financial arrangement that attracts customers whose investments are used to pay the originators and first members, thus creating a fraudulent cycle. As long as subscriptions increase, the deception is covered up, but as soon as the income from the new victims is not enough to pay back the clients, the system collapses...

This is not a story about a salesman on the sly. In the 1920s, Victor Lustig really wanted to sell THE Eiffel Tower. Born in 1890 in Central Europe to a bourgeois family, the young man was a brilliant schoolboy, spoke several languages, but he gradually turned to crime and scams, especially involving card games. In 1920, he left to conquer the United States where he pretended to be an accountant. Among other things, he managed to swindle Al Capone by selling him a fake money printing machine...

The history of art has known many stories of forgers, and even today some manage to deceive techniques of authentication. Some of them say their best accomplice is art dealers greed, more than their credulity. Where is the line between imitation and counterfeit ? Between the real and the fake ? Is the signature the main element of a painting ? Doesn't the fact that many forgers can deceive experts say something about their talent, or even their genius ? Among the list of the most famous swindlers, let's take a look at one of the most recent and impressive : Wolfgang Beltracchi.

The principle is simple: contact large fortunes with a patriotic streak, public figures and businessmen, and ask them for a favor: the French state cannot publicly pay ransoms for French hostages, they need these benefactors to finance such operations, for which they would be reimbursed later. To gain the victims' trust, the impostors make video calls, where one of them wearing a silicone mask pretends to be the Defense Minister...

It is often said that money attracts money. Anna Delvey is certainly convinced of this. A Russian-German heiress and successful fashion industry professionnal, Delvey is making a name for herself in New York's upper crust. There's no better way to win over the city's rich than to look as rich as they are. The problem is it's all a facade : her real name is Anna Sorokin, she has no money to speak of, and her lifestyle is based entirely on the credulity of her social circle...