It was a time when anything seemed possible–instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury–and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors’ money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the “rob Peter to pay Paul” scam to an art form. At the peak of his success, Ponzi was raking in more than $2 million a week at his office in downtown Boston. Then his house of cards came crashing down–thanks in large part to the relentless investigative reporting of Richard Grozier’s Boston Post. A classic American tale of immigrant life and the dream of success, Ponzi’s Scheme is the amazing story of the magnetic scoundrel who launched the most successful scheme of financial alchemy in modern history.

Just who was the man whose name has become synonymous with the classic “rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul” scam in which money from new investors is used to reward earlier ones? In December 1919, he was an unknown thirty-eight-year-old, self-educated Italian immigrant with a borrowed two-hundred dollars in his pocket. Six months later, he was Boston’s famed “wizard of finance,” lionized by the public and politicians alike. Based on exclusive interviews with people who knew Charles Ponzi, lent him their money, and exposed him, Donald Dunn’s Ponzi recreates both one of America’s most notorious and colorful financial con artists and the mad money-hungry era in which he thrived.

"As the global economy struggles to avoid meltdown, so the greatest Ponzi scheme in history approaches its final death rattle. Politicians have stood by and watched the financial industry create a massive overhang of debt, a mountain of low quality assets - and ultimately, an economic disaster which has dwarfed all others. The Eurozone crisis and the LIBOR manipulation scandal are just two symptoms of a much broader problem: one of vastly excessive debt, regulatory failure, a culture of deceit on Wall Street and the City of London, and governments that have promised their citizens far more than they can deliver"--Publisher.

Charles Ponzi perpetrated his infamous scheme almost a hundred years ago. But his method of using new investments to pay existing investors and finance a highflying lifestyle is alive and well: just as much money is lost in the United States today from Ponzi schemes as from shoplifting. Somehow, con artists are able to dazzle wealthy, educated individuals and sophisticated institutions and convince them to hand over huge sums of money. How? In The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle, renowned legal scholar Tamar Frankel explores these con artists' fascinating power of persuasion and deception, uncovering the subtle signals that mimic truth and honesty. After years of close study of hundreds of cases, Frankel explains the striking patterns that emerge and the common characteristics of the con artists and their victims. She offers clear yet comprehensive descriptions of the various designs of Ponzi schemers' attractive offers and flags the ways in which they mask their deception through specialized methods of advertising and selling. She then constructs lucid profiles of the con artists and their victims, exposing the core nature of the people at the heart of the schemes and showing how over time the lines between predator and prey are blurred. There are indeed many lessons to learn from these stories, and Frankel brings them to light through the insightful results of her research. She shows how peoples' attitudes are ambivalent and uncertain toward con artists, perhaps because their behavior is so seemingly honest, because they act like the social leaders with whom they are likely to mingle, or perhaps because their actions are thought to shake up a complacent society. Frankel concludes by offering a surprising solution on how to prevent charming, dangerous con artists from perpetuating the enduring, disastrous legacy of Charles Ponzi.

In the space of three years, from 2009 to 2012 Bernie Madoff, Tom Petters and R. Allen Stanford were all convicted for running multi-billion dollar Ponzi schemes. These three schemes alone have had the largest financial take in U.S. history. But what role does the economy and legislation play in the occurrences of Ponzi schemes? What is the nature of Ponzi schemes and what are their tools and mechanisms? What can we know about Ponzi perpetrators? Unraveling the answers to these questions (and many more), Marie Springer provides the first representative portrait of Ponzi schemes, their perpetrators, and their victims. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, she begins by presenting an overview of different types of Ponzi schemes. She later explores perpetrators and victims of Ponzi schemes followed by a close examination of economic trends, regulatory changes, and the financial relationship with Ponzi schemes. Other key features include: • A non-technical overview of both offender based and offense-based approaches of studying this form of fraud. • Examples of Ponzi schemes and Ponzi schemers. • A wealth of descriptive statistics on known federal cases from the 1960s until the present to quantify this specific form of fraud. Broadening our understanding of Ponzi schemes as a form of white-collar crime, The Politics of Ponzi Schemes provides an excellent foundation for students and practitioners of public administration, banking, as well as investors, finance and accounting, law enforcement officers, legislators and regulators.

This true crime exposé details the exploits of a Florida lawyer and master con artist who stole more than a billion dollars before getting caught. In what became one of the most ruthless Ponzi schemes in United States history, Fort Lauderdale attorney Scott Rothstein stole $1.4 billion to finance his opulent lifestyle. It’s a story of corruption, murder, sex, and suicide in which no one is innocent. From Rothstein’s humble beginnings in the Bronx through his sudden rise to become one of the most powerful men in Florida, the full story is revealed in The Ultimate Ponzi. An employment lawyer of flamboyant charm and seemingly endless wealth, Rothstein infiltrated South Florida society by posing as a philanthropist. All the while, he was using criminal kingpin methods to corrupt one prominent businessman after another. But in late 2009, South Florida learned that Rothstein was far from generous—he was a destructive con artist who plundered investor accounts to build his own fortune. With photographs and input from community members and psychologists, The Ultimate Ponzi reveals the man behind the scam that deceived hundreds. Despite Rothstein’s lavish lifestyle, he was unable to escape judgment both from the law and from the society he used to manipulate.