He is the greatest grifter the world has ever seen. He ran the longest of long cons. He hustled the most money. His marks include millionaires and movie magnets as well as thousands of ordinary victims all over the globe. Tomorrow Bernie Madoff will be sentenced for masterminding the biggest con the world has ever seen. This World: The Madoff Hustle, BBC 2009
Had confessed to swindling billions of dollars from investors. Madoff was the last person on Wall Street most people would have suspected of such a crime. ibid.
The supply of money and marks always dries up in the end. ibid.
Madoff may have stolen as much as $64 billion. ibid.
Every day in Britain 100 people become a victim of fraud shopping online. Organised crime is now targeting the world’s biggest site. The eBay Scammers, ITV 2017
‘This criminal gang are offering cars, vans for sale on eBay that don’t exist … it’s a copy-paste using eBay’s logo.’ ibid. rozzer
Detectives from the London Regional Fraud Team are about to arrest a Romanian gang involved in a multi-million-pound eBay fraud. ibid.
When a forgery is passed off as the real thing there are fortunes to be made and lost. For nearly a decade two Englishmen did just that. Between them they produced hundreds of modern masterpieces and plundered major art archives to fake their provenance. Their activities literally changed our history. It was one of the greatest frauds the art world has ever seen. Art of the Heist s1e4: The Forger and the Conman
John Myatt had been to art school but this was the start of a new career. ibid.
Drewe became a lucrative client and Myatt began to like him. ibid.
John Myatt had allowed himself to be trapped by John Drewe. ibid.
Drewe was presenting himself as a patron of the arts. ibid.
How many other fakes were there? And by how many artists? ibid.
As many as two hundred of them were now in circulation. ibid.
John Myatt finally decided he had had enough. ibid.
The eight years of frauds and fakes was about to come to an end. ibid.
John Myatt pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison. John Drewe maintained his innocence throughout but was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. ibid.
Of the 200 or so Myatt fakes only 72 have ever been found. ibid.
‘Why would you have Michael Jackson as your best man?’ Reputations s9e3: Uri Geller, critic, BBC 2002
It’s 30 years since Uri Geller captured the attention of the media by bending a fork on British television … He claimed to do it using the power of his mind. ibid.
He walked out of the studio during his first ever television appearance when his supernatural powers failed him. ibid.
By 1971 Geller’s showbiz career in Israel had collapsed. ibid.
You can see how the branches of the vines are all twisting, tortuous. It’s very traditional … It’s phantasmagoric. Sour Grapes, Laurent Ponsot, winemaker, 2016
I guess the auction scene really started in the ’90s in the dot-com boom. Everybody was making money. They developed this culture of very wealthy collectors gathering at these auctions to see and be seen, to be seen bidding. And the prices really started to escalate. ibid. Jay McInerney, wine writer
2000 or early 2001: we were doing auctions and I started being aware of you know this skinny, geeky guy that liked wine. ibid. Maureen Downey, wine consultant
Rudy Kurniawan inhabits a high-rolling club of wine fanatics to whom money’s no object. Young and hip, he’s upped the wine ante. ibid. Corie Brown, Times staff writer
Between 2003 and 2006 John Kapon sells more than $35 million of wine from Rudy’s cellar. ibid. caption
Everything with this fellow kept coming up fake. ibid. investigator
In 2011, Bill Koch’s lawyers interviewed Rudy about counterfeit bottles Koch had bought from another collector. The bottles had originated from Rudy’s cellar. ibid. caption
There was everything you would need to make fake wine. ibid. FBI raid Rudy’s house
Rudy is charged and taken to a detention centre in New York City. Deemed a flight risk, he is not given bail. ibid. caption
Who backed it? Where did this money come from? Who created it? ibid. investigator
Organised crime steals £2 million from our bank accounts every day. Tonight: detectives investigate a gang who have stole hundreds of credit cards. They uncover the bent bank insiders selling our account details and go after an international gang who have made millions of pounds as they target the criminals behind Britain’s fastest growing crime. Fraud: How They Steal Your Bank Account, ITV 2019
One in five of us have cards stolen or compromised. ibid.
Every day in Britain over 230 people have their account details stolen by card skimming gangs. ibid.
The City of London police regularly arrest corrupt bank workers. ibid.
If we shift toward a model in which we are determining the onset of disease in time for therapy to be effective we will change outcomes. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes, 2019
Elizabeth has raised more than $400 million; the company is valued at $9 billion. ibid. observer
Nestled in the foothills above Silicon Valley there is a 700-acre plot of land called the Stanford Research Park … In the fall of 2014 she [Holmes] moved her bio-tech start-up Theranos to the research park. The company employed 800 people and was valued at nearly $10 billion: 4 years later it was worth less than zero. ibid. commentary
The value of the story: this compelling tale of divining hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood. ibid.
She had a policy of controlling demonstrations and tightly guarding access to the Edison prototypes. ibid.
It was a mess inside. ibid. company worker on machine
Then after a while people became paranoid of one another. ibid. worker
With the Walgreens rollout, the problems at Therenos were magnifying. ibid.
Their downfall was when they started giving us results that were not matching up with other labs. ibid. woman
Internally, we had so little faith in these tests but were still resulting them on patients. ibid. lab technician
Nothing works. We’re on a sinking ship. It’s a lie. ibid. worker
I knew that most of their blood tests were run on commercial analysers. ibid. John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal
In 2018 Theranos dissolved. Elizabeth and Sunny were charged with conspiracy and fraud. They pleaded not guilty. ibid.
Deputy, I’m looking at evidence of a vast financial conspiracy involving blatant tax fraud and the repurposing of corporate funds for personal gain. Fargo s3e10: Somebody to Love, financial dude, Netflix 2017
Mike Duffy never ran for public office but became as famous of the politicians he reported on. He was born to smooze and it took him to the top of his profession in radio and TV. It was fun and it was funny when it was just a joke but beneath the joking lurked a secret dream. An appointment to the senate made the private lifestyle of the bon vivant public business. And a $90,000 cover-up has turned the newsman into news. The Fifth Estate: The Rise and Fall of Mike Duffy, CBC 2014
An audit that would eventually flag four senators: Harb, Brazeau, Wallin, Duffy for dubious expenses. ibid.
Earlier this morning in Birmingham Alabama an indictment was unsealed charging Richard Schrushy, the former CEO of HealthSouth Corporation, with fraud, money laundering and other offences. Trial by Media s1e4: King Richard, prosecutor
… Has gone from CEO to religious talk show host with his wife by his side … ibid. news
It was just this mindset of we have to hit the numbers. ibid. insider
Months after the conclusion of the HealthSouth trial, Richard Scrushy was indicted for bribing the former government of Alabama, Don Spiegelman. ibid. caption
America: the world’s greatest democracy, and at its heart the vote, the will of the people. But how do you know if the vote is counted correctly? And if you don’t know then what have you got? Democracy? James Naughton, Hacking Democracy, HBO 2006
This is the story of a small group of citizens headed by a grandmother … How does American count its vote? What they found is secrecy, votes in the trash and how to change the course of history. ibid.
In 2000 Al Gore lost the presidential election in Florida amongst the chaos and arguments over how to recount the votes, but no-one thought to ask how the computers originally counted the results. ibid.
The origin of the negative votes was never proved. ibid.
‘… Dozens and dozens of elections that were miscounted by machines.’ ibid. activist