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You may know the term tipster from the world of sports betting. It refers to a sort of adviser, who will give tips to gamblers. Thomas Boursin, at just 18 years old, launches his own Facebook page in 2014, to give advice on sports betting...
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His name may ring a bell, perhaps you've heard about the man who bought the last album of the famous rap group Wu Tang Clan, published in a single copy at auction. Who, on the sidelines of the 2016 US presidential election, offered $5,000 in rewards to whoever would bring him a lock of Hillary Clinton's hair. But when, in 2015, he was named the most hated personality in America, it was for a much more important matter...
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Born into a modest family in the Bronx, Jordan Belfort grew up in Queens with dreams of becoming rich. When he was told in dental school that the golden age of the profession was over, he left the school to work in finance. It was the late 80's, and the Wall Street jungle was in its full glory...
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Desiring to become a physician, but unable to afford medical school, John Brinkley, born in 1885 to a modest North Carolina family, decided to buy a degree outright. With no skills whatsoever, he was now allowed to practice in Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Obviously, this could only spell disaster...
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Zhen Wang Huang is an Indonesian who is considered one of the leading experts in oenology in the early 2000s. Born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, he immigrated to the United States in 1998 and studied in California. He quickly took the name Rudy Kurniawan, and presented himself as a rich Indonesian heir. He started a career as a wine collector, specializing in French wines and became a key figure in the industry at the age of 30...
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Portrayed by actress Romy Schneider in the film La Banquière, Marthe Hanau has gradually fallen into oblivion. Which is a shame : her story deserves to be remembered ! Born in 1886 in Paris, she became one of the rare businesswomen working in finance at the turn of the 20th century. It must be said that ever since her adolescence, Marthe was determined to lead the life she wanted, despite her parents' authority...
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Born in Stockholm in 1817 into a modest family, Aurora Florentina Magnusson had an early desire to rise above her social standing. In the 1830s, she worked as a domestic servant. In 1838, while working for a wealthy family, she befriended the daughter of the house. The young woman became her companion and accomplice. Indeed, in the 1840s the two young women lived together and traveled between Sweden and Finland. During this period, Aurora changed her identity, becoming Helga de la Brache. In 1860, the friends returned to Stockholm and launched the swindle that would establish Helga's legend.
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Little known to the general public, this Kazakh businessman has nevertheless committed dantesque frauds. First a politician in Kazakhstan, Mukhtar Ablyazov was convicted in 1999 for abuse of power, embezzlement, tax evasion and fraud during his term as Minister of Energy. In 2002, as chairman of the supervisory board of a public company, he was charged with abuse of power by the financial police.
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This forger had the audacity to make counterfeits of artists who were his own contemporaries ! Born in France in 1935 under the name Henri Abel Abraham Haddad, he used many pseudonyms of which David Stein is the most famous. He began his forgeries in Paris, and even went so far as to meet Picasso in the south of France to have a drawing he wanted to sell authenticated, deceiving the great artist himself ! Aware of his stroke of genius, but also of the difficulty of ripping off art dealers in Paris, he decided to leave for the United States. It is there that David really become an exceptional forger, selling false paintings of masters at low prices.
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He may not be one of the most successful swindlers, but Christophe Rocancourt has become a media personality. He had a difficult childhood, with a complicated family situation and was abandoned in an orphanage at only nine years old. It was there he made his first thefts. As a teenager, he moved to Paris, where he had no money but met people who made him discover the world of night life. From then on, he got along thanks to his natural charisma and his talent for lying.
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Recently brought back to light with a documentary series on Netflix, the value added tax fraud on carbon quotas, is a huge scam that was in the news in the first decade of the 2000s in France. Some even consider this case the scam of the young century. The idea was born in 2005, when EU policies on environmental conservation put in place a tax on carbon emissions from large companies. Through a cap and trade system, all european companies have a sort of pollution quota beyond which they must pay if they want to continue to emit. To do so, the company would buy a share of the quota not exploited by another company. But the swindlers detect a flaw in the system: the value added tax...
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Nothing predestined Aldo Bonassoli, an Italian farmer and science enthusiast, to be at the heart of a French state scandal. However, with his Belgian associate Alain de Villegas, Aldo meets Jean Violet, a French lawyer with an important political network, and thus marks the beginning of a rather unusual engineering adventure. Indeed, Bonassoli and de Villegas have a project to develop a device which embarked on a plane is able to detect oil deposits from the air.
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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 !
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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 !
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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