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.