The most notorious scammers of all time

When people hear the word “scammer”, they usually picture an anonymous email sender in an internet cafe. History says otherwise. Some of the largest frauds of the last century were organised by people with strong social skills: memory, nerve, charm, and an instinct for the weak point in a system.

Here are ten people behind major frauds, from Charles Ponzi to the founder of Theranos. The point is not to admire them, but to recognise the mechanics. Similar methods are still used today, in smaller formats and in online scams.

Charles Ponzi, the inventor

Charles Ponzi arrived in the United States from Italy in 1903 with almost nothing. In 1919, he founded a small company in Boston and promised a 50% return in 45 days, or double the money in 90 days, by buying and reselling international reply coupons. These postal vouchers could be bought cheaply in one country and exchanged for stamps of higher value in another. Currency devaluations after the First World War created a real price difference.

The arbitrage existed, but not at that scale. Ponzi paid early investors with the money of later ones, and the scheme collapsed in the summer of 1920. Some 40,000 people had entrusted him with around 20 million dollars, and most of it was gone. His name became the generic term for the mechanism: the Ponzi scheme.

Bernard Madoff, the one who went further

Madoff ran what is widely described as one of the largest Ponzi schemes, for decades, from a respected Wall Street firm. His clients were banks, foundations and wealthy investors. Many trusted him because he had been recommended by people they knew.

When the firm collapsed in December 2008, the statements claimed more than 65 billion dollars in client accounts. The money actually invested by customers was about 17.3 billion dollars. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison and died there in 2021. His victims were not necessarily gullible. The case shows that a good reputation can make a fraud harder to detect.

Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower

Born in 1890 in Hostinné, in what was then Bohemia and is now the Czech Republic, Victor Lustig spoke five languages and made his living on transatlantic liners, cheating at cards and borrowing money he never returned. He was also a forger, and a man who kept a written list of rules for con artists.

In 1925, in Paris, he read a newspaper article about the cost of maintaining the Eiffel Tower. The monument was rusting and expensive to repaint, and the article suggested that public opinion might one day favour removing it. That was enough. Posing as a senior official of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, he invited a group of scrap metal dealers to a confidential meeting in an expensive hotel. He explained that the government had decided to dismantle the tower and sell it as scrap, and that the operation had to stay secret to avoid an outcry.

He even took the dealers to the monument, on a visit arranged with a forged official pass, and let them bid. One of them, André Poisson, decided to secure the deal. Lustig, playing the corrupt official, suggested that a bribe would help. According to most accounts, Poisson paid about 70,000 francs in total, including the bribe.

Then Lustig waited. Had Poisson gone to the police, he would have had to admit publicly that he had been fooled into buying a national monument. He said nothing, and the scammer understood that he could do it again. He came back to Paris a few weeks later and tried the same trick on a second dealer, who this time went to the police. Lustig fled to the United States.

He was arrested in 1935 for a counterfeiting operation large enough to worry the American authorities. He escaped from a federal detention centre in New York by faking illness and climbing out with a rope made of torn sheets, and was caught again in Pittsburgh a month later. He was sentenced to twenty years and spent the rest of his life in prison, mostly in Alcatraz. He died of pneumonia in 1947, at a federal medical centre in Missouri.

A final detail, which says everything about him: a Czech historian who searched the records of his supposed home town found no trace of his birth. Even the identity of the man who sold the Eiffel Tower is, in part, a construction.

Frank Abagnale, the impostor who became a consultant

Arrested in France at 21, Frank Abagnale had already passed himself off as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, and cashed forged cheques across the United States. His story inspired Catch Me If You Can. He later used those skills to build a career as a fraud prevention consultant.

His own account of those years has been questioned by journalists, who found several episodes impossible to verify. Which is, in itself, a useful warning: a gifted storyteller does not stop being one when he changes sides.

Christophe Rocancourt, the chameleon

A Frenchman who moved to the United States in the late 1990s, Rocancourt lived on borrowed identities: Rockefeller heir, film producer, boxer, member of a wealthy European family. He studied the biographies of the people he met, learned their interests, and entered their social circle.

He extracted money from decorators, models and a few celebrities, and was eventually arrested and imprisoned in both the United States and France. His story circulates with a legend that he learned English by comparing a French and an American Bible: it belongs to the folklore around him rather than to the record.

Gilbert Chikli, the fake president

Before “fake president fraud” became a standard label in corporate security, Chikli was already using the technique. The method required patience: identify a company’s executives, learn how it validates payments, find an employee with authority to transfer money, then call while impersonating the chairman and asking for an urgent, confidential payment.

Among the victims cited in the cases: La Banque Postale, Crédit Lyonnais, Galeries Lafayette and Disneyland Paris. In 2020, he was tried in France for a new case involving the impersonation of the foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, in which large sums were extracted from wealthy individuals and companies.

Grégory Zaoui and the carbon tax fraud

After a 2005 European agreement, companies received quotas of pollution rights that could be bought and sold. Zaoui and his accomplices exploited a technical flaw: they bought quotas tax-free in one country and resold them with tax in another, keeping the tax they had never paid.

The operation, run in France in 2008 and 2009, is estimated at around 1.5 billion euros in lost public revenue, which earned it the name “fraud of the century”. It is the clearest example of a fraud that requires no charm and no victim in front of you: only a badly designed system.

Alfred Sirven, the embezzler of Elf

Number two at the oil company Elf in the early 1990s, Sirven organised a system of commissions and slush funds through hundreds of accounts and offshore structures. He was arrested in 2001 in the Philippines after years on the run, and convicted in France.

His case says less about individual greed than about what happens when a company’s money flows through networks nobody controls. It also shows what happens when the people who should check the money are part of the arrangement.

Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos

In 2003, at 19, Holmes left Stanford to found Theranos, promising a machine that could run dozens of medical tests from a single drop of blood. Investors put hundreds of millions of dollars into the company, which reached a valuation of nine billion dollars, and the pharmacy chain Walgreens agreed to install its devices in stores.

The technology did not work. Tests were run on conventional machines, and documents were falsified to hide this fact. The Wall Street Journal revealed the situation in 2015, following the reporting of John Carreyrou. Holmes was convicted of fraud in January 2022 and sentenced to more than eleven years in prison.

Aldo Bonassoli and the sniffer plane

Aldo Bonassoli repaired televisions in Ventimiglia, in Italy, and described himself as an inventor. In 1976, with a Belgian partner, he convinced the state-owned oil group Elf that he had built a device able to detect oil deposits from a plane in flight, which would have made exploration far cheaper. He agreed to demonstrate it only in the absence of scientists, on the grounds that they might steal his idea.

The technique did not exist. Elf spent over 150 million dollars on the project before the contract was ended in 1979, and the affair became a political scandal when the press revealed it in 1983. Its lesson: the more technical the promise, the fewer people can challenge it. And the fewer people who can challenge it, the more the inventor is trusted.

What these cases have in common

• None of them asked for money from strangers on the first day. They built trust first.
• Each one used a real institution as a shield: a bank, a ministry, a company, a diploma.
• Their victims rarely spoke up, out of embarrassment. Silence is what allowed some of the fraudsters to continue.
• The system was often the weak point, not the person: an unchecked payment, a quota, a machine nobody tested.

The modern versions are less glamorous and far more numerous. The 419 advance fee scam, fake investment platforms and fake president fraud all descend from these cases. If you are offered a fortune, a guaranteed return or a confidential deal, the question to ask is not whether the story is plausible. It is who benefits from you believing it quickly.