All this stuff about Elizabeth Holmes had me thinking about who commit fraud, what they do, how often they do it, if they get caught. Would there be some way to rank them? I'll mention a couple below, but would like to know if anyone wants to add one, could be a public person or someone they know personally (keep it light):
Elizabeth Holmes: started Theranos, defrauded investors, the public and big business of what her machines were able to do. Basically shot for the moon and didn't get higher than you can jump.
Bernie Madoff: hedge fund fraudster, ran a ponzi scheme that collapsed mainly due to the 2008 financial crisis. Played by fat Richard Dreyfus in the ABC cable movie, played by basic Robert De Niro in the HBO movie.
John Spano: subject of ESPN 30 for 30 "Big Shot". Basically took ownership of the Islanders hockey team and "promised" to make good on the payment, but didn't have anywhere near the funds. Rolled with some billionaires in Texas so everyone though he was good for the money. NHL strong armed him in to handing ownership of the team back to them, made due diligence on team purchases a thing now.
Hilaria Baldwin: Alec Baldwin's wife, born in Boston, pretends to be Spanish.
Dude Perfect guys: bunch of guys who started filming themselves taking blind free throws (probably?) and parlayed it into gaining top five youtube viewership. I respect hustle, but I know that even as lame as some stuff on ESPN these days (cornhole, pool, darts) the guys on TV are significantly better than myself. I shouldn't be able to randomly take four other people from WSO and do what you do.
Ned "Carlos" Mencia: had a TV show on comedy central, accused of stealing jokes from George Lopez, who ironically, was also accused of stealing the same joke from another guy.
Ahahaha dude perfect fuck those guys
cant tell whats worse... those guys themselves, people who watch more than i'd say 3 of their videos, or people who go to their live shows
A monkey could do what they do with enough time.
I respect that they are also pretty lowkey serious Christians and thus don't swear and promote family-friendly content.
Keith Raniere, leader of NXIVM. Was just sentenced to life for running a sex cult out of his self help / MLM / executive training company. This cult was really interesting because he was able to con some bright / educated people, actresses in legit shows, etc.
There’s a show in it - the Vow on HBO. It’s honestly so dark that I have to watch a cheerful cartoon after each episode to get my mind right
NXIVM is connected to a lot bigger things than the HBO show indicates. It ties into Epstein and some powerful politicians.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/osc-quadriga-gerald-cotten-1.5607990
Years from now, we'll uncover a fuck ton of fraud coming out of the crypto space.
Then I'll have to resurrect this thread somewhere between the next week or couple years
most, if not all permanent life insurance salespeople
anyone in a MLM operation
but my favorite, my absolute favorites are shittigroup execs bob rubin and charles prince, who said (direct quote from july 2007) “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance, we're still dancing." he was out of a job less than 4 months later. fucker. nearly ruined smith barney
Why life insurance?
Much of the time it enriches the broker via a fat one time commission and is an inferior option to other wealth building alternatives.
it has a place, sure, but I've noticed more and more people leading with it instead of just saying "dollar cost average into low cost funds and buy term insurance" which would be the more prudent
Trevor Milton, Nikola founder.
Or the guy from Fyre Festival
Billy Macfarland, all time fraudster...shoutout Ja Rule for helping out
what's the latest on Trevor now?
Jail and bail. Will be prosecuted hard.
In the eighties, the mob figured out how to pocket the taxes paid on gasoline in NY through an elaborate set of dummy companies. At one point they were running this scam on 1/3 to 1/2 of the gasoline in the entire NY metro area.
Do you know what made them stop?
bullets
Joe Biden - in one of the more elaborate rouses in history, he hid in his basement for nearly a year and successfully kept anyone from getting wise to the fact that he had full-blown dementia.
Except every boomer on Facebook and Trump seems to think so
I refuse to believe anyone this retarded works in IB
Top bucket, early A2A, offered internal laterals by industry groups I've been cross-staffed w/. If you think that Joe Biden is all there, or that his policies haven't been the most immediate and visibly abysmal failures of any president since Carter, then you're a fucking idiot. It sounds like you're a fucking idiot.
Despite what people think, it is still possible to point out Biden’s numerous failures and also acknowledge that Trump is a buffoon. Just because one thinks Biden is doing a worse job than Carter does not mean that they believe Trump is awesome (idk maybe you do think that but I don’t really care tbh).
Agreed. I didn't vote for Trump, and I'll be honest I love that he got away with all the insane shit he said. But, I've watched too many clips of Biden not knowing what he was saying, just incomprehensible. It doesn't mean I don't like the politics, but the man is out of it. We need a cap on age limits, 65 would be a good max age limit.
It is also possible to point out that the 2020 election was highly unusual with many irregularities, even by US standards, without being a nutjob. It'll be several years before people have an honest conversation about it. Also you can't really flip on a dime from going Russia hacked to the 2016 election to saying the 2020 election was totally normally where nothing unusual happened. These are from the same people who say Bush 2000 was rigged.
Based as fuck.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Adam Neumann, the WeWork guy
One hand big frauster...the other, if you can sell people office sharing but make them think its some kind of tech innovation, that's since fraud but I guess good on your part
Trump has to be up there somewhere. Dude was president while funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in government business to his real estate properties including Mar a lago
pretty much anyone interested politics really. Fucking leeches
You know that was at cost right? Not saying it was a good idea, but the Trump properties weren't profiting.
Booking rooms at a hotel "at cost" is still a profit making enterprise, since the alternative is that they don't actually book up at all.
Second, the fact that Mr Trump spent 10% of his time as POTUS at one of his properties, specifically Mar a Lago. Foreign diplomats and Americans looking for access or influence had only to stay there as well (and not "at cost") or join the club. His mere presence drove profit margins; we're not talking about a handful of days where he was at a Trump property - it was a major percentage of his time as POTUS. If Mr Obama or Biden had said that for 10% of their Presidency, you'd have to pay them to have a conversation, you would have heard the talking heads at Fox exploding from across the country. So even if you want to claim that the American taxpayer footed literally zero dollars of his stays at his properties (an obviously untrue statement), he's still using his position as POTUS to drive business to those properties.
You have to be a complete mouth breather, or registered Republican I suppose, to try and argue that Mr Trump's Administration wasn't geared in part towards driving business towards his various interests.
There is a TV show called "American Greed" that covers exactly this topic.
https://trakt.tv/shows/american-greed/seasons/all
True, I've seen this, got on a kick for a while. The people on the show definitely commit fraud, I was thinking more people who you see as "Frauds" like my example of Dude perfect in my original post
Mikel arteta
Not super versed in soccer...is he just a really bad coach or did he actually do something?
ohhh he is a legend though. used to play for the team I support.
Israel
What about Israel makes it a scam?
No response?
Nice try, Rabbi...
Democrat party
you forgot the capitalization. It's democRAT, remember?
No it's the DemonRats
Any hedge fund earning 2 and 20 and not actually generating alpha.....PE funds that beat the market by using leverage rather than alpha....I could go on....Bernie Madoff is small potatoes compared to these guys.
How is it a fraud when rich guys choose to have hedge funds and private equity manage their wealth?
If you're misrepresenting luck, leverage, and beta as alpha, I certainly believe that you are being fraudulent.
If a rich guy chooses to invest in your fund and you explain that the returns are really created by excessive leverage and no special ability of your team, then I certainly don't see anything fraudulent about that. But how many funds advertise that way? Maybe only, Vanguard ETFs lol.
who is getting 2 and 20 these days
Thankfully less and less funds as people are waking up to the fraud!
The goal of Hedge funds isn't always to generate more return than the market. Because you clearly aren't aware.
Yes sometimes true and sometimes an excuse for not being able to beat the market.
Yeah but the average hedge fund lasts like 5ish years so it’s not like they trade returns for stability
Right but that attitude is kind of why it's a scam. Or perhaps not a scam, but a fundamentally dishonest marketing approach.
It's all well and good to say "we don't aim to beat the market," but you also have to be good at preserving capital in a downturn. I don't know where to find the data, or even if it's published at all, but it would be interesting to see which percentage of funds actually outperform over the long term. If the average life of a hedge fund is only 5 or 6 years, then saying "hey, invest with us, you won't beat the market even before fees, but you have downside protection" is fundamentally dishonest and bad financial advice, since said fund is unlikely to even be around long enough to offer said downside protection.
1. Chamath Palihapitiya.
2. Chris Haroun: Teaches a bunch of Udemy courses and makes it sound like you can take some of his courses and really have a shot at a worthwhile high finance career on just that.
3. Dan Pena, Dan Lok, Tai Lopez, and that entire community.
4. Jim Kramer: Just. Why is this guy still allowed to be on TV? Is he really bringing in that massive entertainment value?
Almost felt sick while writing this list out.
Dan Pena guy is strange.... guys a tool
+ Grant Cardone
Can someone explain the Grant Cardone thing to me? Seems to me without research like a cheap Tony Robbins type of rip-off who overly attracts dudes who self-identify way too much as "alpha"
#2 Chris Haroun of HEV or Haroun Education Ventures. Here is some more detail:
Chris Haroun sells a $10,000 one-on-one coaching course and promises a lot.
His new "offering" in 2025 is a Circle community which is the same "MBA" videos plus some new content put back into another wrapper for an annual $495 fee. If you cannot afford the $10,000 one on one coaching, then he will sell you the $999 MBA "Silver" course.
He claimed to have passed the Series 7 exam after studying for only 2 days, but he does not appear on the SEC website or FINRA Brokercheck website. This does not make sense when others appear on the website.
If you listen to him speak long enough, then you will realize that he has a very simplistic, basic understanding of different sub-industries in finance. No doubt that he worked at big name places, but he seems to have survived through his charm and niceness rather than long term ability.
He talked about being inspired by Tony Robbins, and investing in Facebook Pre-IPO and Palantir. It seems like he has a mix of recycling his own stories with added stories of other people from movies or possibly peers.
Mr. Krabs. It's very obvious that his burger shop is a front for a drug smuggling business. Bikini Bottom was a nice place before he opened up. I've seen officers parked outside of Krusty Krab. Probably in there receiving payments and "free burgers".
Once met a guy who was just sentenced 21 months for operating a ponzi fraud scheme. Ordered to pay restitution of $1.8mm plus a small fine.
Total loser lmao.
All of the guys from school who went on to be Northwester Mutual "Financial Representatives"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj_Rajaratnam
I remember this guy from the CNBC show American Greed...always makes me wonder how many people are getting away with insider trading. I don't want to say people can be "smart" about it, but maybe less greedy.
if youre inside on an asset and watch the stock price before an IPO is announced publicly you can watch it rally.
The finance influencer. Can't think of a place that is more infected with absolute nonsense (read: teenage entrepreneurs). I also like how this time last year there were tons of social-media day traders who were day/swingtrading stuff like TSLA and preaching the market can't drop. Would love to see them buy the dip with all that cash they set aside.
The real estate guru. Over-levered to the tits. Constantly yelling "CASHFLOW". Preaching about their immaculate strategy of buying a crackhouse for $200,000, installing new cabinets and appliances, then selling for $250,000. "WE ARE ADDING VALUE".
Also if there's an old guy who wears exclusively Tommy Bahama, odds are he commits fraud or had it happen to him.
Most of the VC space, particularly in raising funds (and don't get me started on exiting). Half of the entrepreneurs aren't looking to build anything of societal value. Lie/cheat/steal your way to $X in revenue, market the most egregiously out-to-lunch comp as a direct competitor in your "worldview", sell and unload the reins to pursue another venture. Ideally your next venture is something to do with sustainable food production, online/crypto/BLOCKchain education, or an anti-aging / health serum. Not much funnier in the world than seeing some poor immigrant get twisted up in the Silicon Valley ratrace to sell your morals for cash, before turning 180 degrees and preaching the benefits of close-knit communities ("Did you know we lived in small tribes for thousands of years? There's just so many benefits we've lost since then, right?"). Big bonus points if you say any of these realizations occurred during their LSD/Acid/Ayahuasca/DMT trip.
Real estate guru- I love when those guys talk about buying business that have "cashflow"; i understand how accounting works, but I always think, are the people they are preaching to really investing in pre-revenue companies?
The VC guy- my cousins husband works for a VC billionaire guy, got lucky and sold his business to Amazon in the early days that basically went bankrupt. They worship at his altar, I get it, I respect hustle, but at the end of the day like you said its not creating value.
Don't you understand, cashflow in the real estate game creates gEnErAtIoNaL wEaLtH
The amount of tech guys who sold early and have since then been hucking hail mary's via their VC shop is outrageous. People think that because the person exited at X valuation, everything he touches will turn gold. Cue Ivy MBAs crowding into the cap table. Lo and behold the valuation does turn gold!
I love these guys. Take a video walking through a casino, talking about how they're worth $300mm or something... because they own properties valued at $300mm.
First two are fair, but imagine seriously thinking that most entrepreneurs building venture backed startups are fraudsters. Esp when you are posting on a finance forum, a leech industry where we provide functionally identical services and rely on actual operators to create value in order to get fees. If it were so easy to make money in entrepreneurship, hordes of undergraduates would be spinning up these "scams" overnight and make killings. You're just plain wrong and sound butthurt. Is your salary as a development analyst that bad?
My cousin tells anyone who will listen about her days working at McKinsey/“in consulting” and being co-alums with Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Chelsea Clinton, etc.
She was a graphic designer there for like 8 months
lmao, 'graphic design' is basically the truthful job description of being a junior consultant
Jeffrey Keith Skilling
Tom Nash
Dude perfect is a kids show, not a fraud. You're retarded
Honestly a majority of foreign (non-US) financiers. As much as we condemn a lot of folk in the US for sleezy or duplicitous-seeming activity, looking at financiers in HK/India/any non-EU/US country are generally shady as fuck. The amount of accepted corruption and accepted behavior around such activities is insane.
I mean, you can basically make up numbers in China for the financial statements...shoutout Lucked-in coffee (dunno if I spelled their name right but they don't deserve for me to google it)
And relevant to today's news, hello Evergrande.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_Martoma
this former SAC capital trader’s Wikipedia page is a rollercoaster.
him changing his name is wild...I wonder how many people do that to go to different Ivy league schools, or just go to different places in general (different banks or companies)
I'm Nigerian so I'll have to go with Hushpuppi. He isn't the "biggest" but in terms of non financially complex scams he was pretty huge. When he was arrested in 2020 they found $40m in cash in his hotel room, has over 2m followers on instagram and it is estimated the total fallout from his scam was over $400m. In my country people could not believe he hadn't been arrested because he was so flashy living in Dubai, partying with celebrities and constantly taunted law enforcement.
In the end he got caught trying to pull a COVID related scam and has been extradited to the US where he currently is and had most of his victims.
I wasn't going to put him here but Bloomberg recently did a very flashy article about him and I guess since most of the people here are in finance that will be of interest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-hushpuppi-gucci-influencer/
Tim Tebow in the NFL
Emmanuel Nwude: former Nigerian banker who defrauded a Brazilian bank out of $242 million. It was $191 million in lump cash and then the rest from advance-fees.
How did he do it? He sold a fake airport in Nigeria. He literally promised an airport where they would make the ROI in dividends. They ended up finding out about the fraud when Santander was about to acquire the Brazilian bank, and was wondering why 2/5ths of the bank's funds were in the Cayman Islands unmonitored lol.
All of this led to the Swiss, Brazilian, British, Nigerian and U.S authorities to hunt for this man. When he was caught and sent to trial in Nigeria, he ended up bribing his way out of jail. To this day, he still walks around with probably $200m.
just google this dude. seems to be banged up again on a murder rap.
My direct supervisor.
Trevor Milton of NKLA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_Martoma
Baldwin be wildin.
Anyone engaged in $1 billion+ philanthropy.
Can you explain how they use philanthropy to hide taxes ? Is it through the CRT structure?
Elizabeth Holmes reminds me why I really despise Silicon Valley culture.
Phuck Pharrell
a lot of motivational speakers
Most business influencers. Shameless marketing of themselves as a "brand" and promoting "lifestyles" when they are all propped up by brand partnerships and advertising. Not saying some of them make away with decent cash, but to those who preach work habits and how to succeed in the world when they aren't working an actual job etc it's a joke. This absolutely goes for those who call themselves entrepreneurs because the majority of them count their influencer income as their "business" without giving much thought to what it's like to run an actual business and how their advice doesn't really apply to most of their audience.
I dislike the use of entrepreneur. I know it can have many different meanings, but I feel it should be more reserved when people did something special or out of the ordinary.
Similar to when we see LinkedIn profile with wacky titles; guys open a sandwich shop and start calling themselves entrepreneurs. Business owners yes.
Exactly, and taking that a step further, calling yourself an entrepreneur and preaching business acumen for mass viewers who aren't actually getting real entrepreneurial advice definitely sucks.
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