Eshan Maitra
* Victor Lustig, Sold the Eifel Tower!
This guy is my favorite!He traveled from his home country Czechoslovakia to France after WWI in 1925 and sold the Eifel Tower to scrap metal buyers! Twice! He forged governmental credentials and fake paper. Then finally, got away with $70,000 of that time. After WWI France became very poor to continue to take care of it that was even published in the papers. Lustig only needed that single lead. He convinced the bidder that the country was secretly getting rid of the tower. The bidder was one of the prominent businessman of that time Andre Poisson. So, even after he figured out the scam, he refused to file charges to avoid further humiliation. He sold the tower again and got away from police. This guy even conned Al Capone once! But later,he returned the money. It impressed Al Capone and he was rewarded handful.
* Charles Ponzi, The Legendary Founder of Ponzi Scheme
During, early 2000’ there were coupons that could be redeemed for stamps even from foreign countries. Ponzi found the coupons were very cheap in his country Italy. While the same American stamps these could be redeemed for were 4 times pricier. Hence, he collected 400% profit from his scheme in collecting the American stamps and selling them back in the market. So, even when he started inviting investors hiding his true business or scheme.Thus, he started the biggest Ponzi scheme in 1918 and was earning $¼ million per day in early 1920’s! Later, he was caught but only served 14 years of jail time.
* Jeffrey Skilling, Hit the All Time High Stock Price of $40 billion
Skilling was the CEO of Enron and made this business’s stock look most fruitful to the investors in 2000. It hit the all-time high stock price. Which was only possible by inside trading, money-laundering and false book-keeping. The company had been hemorrhaging the investors’ money for decades. Even one hour before the scam went public, Skilling sold $60 million worth of shares in his wife’s name. Sadly, he is now serving 14 years of prison time since 2001. Soon after, Enron went bankrupt and this was the biggest bankruptcy case in history.
* Bernard Madoff, Mastermind of Most Elaborated Ponzi Scheme
This genius schemer was the former chairman of NASDAQ was charged for the biggest account fraud as well. He grabbed away over $65 billion from his investors. Ironically, these were mostly charity funds and such institutions. Funny thing, they were just funding Madoff’s luxurious con-life. After 50 years his scheme was finally proved in court and was caught at his age of 71, in 2009. Currently serving 150 years of prison sentence. Someone should really revise the sentencing system for con-artists.
* Jordan Belford, The Wolf of the Wall Street
He became a successful Wall Street stockbroker during 1980’s. To become much wealthier, he started his own investing company StrattonOakmont in 1996. There he first introduced the infamous ‘Pump and Dump’ scheme.
Which was, to buy really cheap stocks then scheming wealthy people into buying these at least at the double price of what its initial worth. He specifically targeted the ones who barely cared about stock profits. At a point he had 1000 stock brokers working under his guidance and over $1 billion in stock being sold. Finally, his sham was fully reveled to the public in 2009. He was sentenced four years of prison and was fined $110 million in restitution to his defrauded 1,513 clients. By far he was able to only pay back $11.6 million.