The Golden Age of Fraud is Upon Us

Posted April 27, 2021 by Ben Carlson

A 30-something low-level actor created a business plan that would buy the rights to cheap movies and turn around and sell those rights to HBO for audiences in Latin America.  The investors backing the project were promised returns of 15% in just 6 months.  No bad in an era of 0.25% savings account yields.  Investors forked over more than $690 million to bankroll the rights to these films.

So what’s the catch?

The movie contracts with HBO were fakes, the business plan was a hoax and the entire ordeal was a Ponzi scheme where new money paid off previous investors. The money was used to provide a lavish lifestyle for the architect of the fraud, Zachary Horowitz.1  One investor claimed to have “99% of his and his family’s money” invested in Horowitz’s scheme.

Thodex is a cryptocurrency trading platform in Turkey. Last week it was reported the 27-year-old founder of the exchange took a flight to Albania.   He took with him $2 billion from more than 30k clients.  Last month the company brought in hoards of new clients by offering free dogecoin to anyone that signed up.

Whoops.

I don’t know if this SCAMcoin actually happened or if it’s just a social media thing but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s real:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1385365742506364929

If Charles Ponzi were alive today, I have no doubt that he would be able to raise capital from investors, probably in the form of a SPAC. Many investors would laud him for being a genius as he bilked investors out of millions of dollars.

When I was researching the history of financial scams for Don’t Fall For It the one thing that jumped out above all else is how similar financial frauds are across time and place. They typically involve new technologies, people with extraordinary sales skills and the insatiable human desire for get-rich quick schemes.

Despite the fact that people have been getting duped by hucksters and charlatans for centuries, there was one period that kept coming up over and over again in my research — the 1920s.

It was the golden age of financial fraud.

The Roaring 20s had everything a con-artist looking to dupe people out of their money could ask for — innovation, new financial products, a booming economy, rising markets, new and exciting technologies, loose lending standards, new communication tools and people getting rich all over the place.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/04/the-golden-age-of-fraud-is-upon-us/