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...

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.

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.

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.

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 !

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.

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 !

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.

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...

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.

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...

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.

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...

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.

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.

Hosted by Audion. Visit https://www.audion.fm/privacy-policy for more information.