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.

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.

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...

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.

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...