Lifestyle

Notable scammers throughout history who have carried out large-scale frauds

Published

1 year ago

2023/04/28

There have been several notable scammers throughout history who have carried out large-scale frauds and swindled people out of huge sums of money. Here are some of the biggest scammers in history:

Bernie Madoff

Madoff is an American financier who orchestrated one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history, defrauding investors out of billions of dollars over several decades.

Charles Ponzi

The Ponzi scheme is named after Ponzi, who was an Italian swindler who became infamous for his scam where he promised high returns on investments in a postage stamp speculation scheme. His scam defrauded investors out of millions of dollars.

Emmanuel Nwude

Nwude is a Nigerian businessman who was involved in a scam where he and his co-conspirators convinced a Brazilian bank to transfer $242 million to a bank account in Switzerland. The fraud was based on impersonating the then-president of the Central Bank of Nigeria and is one of the biggest scams in history.

Frank Abagnale

Abagnale is an American former conman who posed as a pilot, doctor, and lawyer to commit frauds and escape authorities. He was eventually caught and his life story was the basis for the movie “Catch Me If You Can”.

Victor Lustig

Lustig was an Austrian conman who became famous for selling the Eiffel Tower twice to unsuspecting investors in the 1920s.

Allen Stanford

Stanford is an American financier who was convicted of running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, one of the biggest in history.

Robert Maxwell

Maxwell was a British media mogul who fraudulently took money from his companies’ pension funds, causing a major scandal when he fell off his yacht and died in 1991.

These scammers and their schemes have caused significant financial losses and have had long-lasting impacts on the people and institutions affected by their frauds.