Scams

"Reinvest, and tell your friends!"

- Charles Ponzi

There's a whole class of fraudulent behavior that's designed to move money from one pocket to another under false pretenses. These con games are often just greedy and dishonest, but can sometimes be clever and creative as well.

I'd feel worse about making a big deal about these crooked schemes if there weren't such a cross-pollenation between the most dishonest bamboozles and the sales pitches that fall like rain in every part of the world where mass media and commerce tryst.

After all, the $45 radionic amulet or the environmentally-safe EuroWash Laundry Ball in the new age catalog, the fresh frozen food in the supermarket, "free trade" agreements, the ownership and transfer of land, the annual going-out-of-business sales, the evening news and the advertisements disguised as money all use a language of bogus claims and deceptive advertising that they share with more amusing and blatant scams.

Capitalism, with its perpetual shell-game of paper money, plastic credit and the like, has been susceptible to con artists from the beginning. Check out such extraordinary popular delusions as The South Sea Bubble, Holland's 17th Century Tulip Mania, The Mississippi Scheme, and the fabulous internet stock bubble - last one in's a rotten egg!

Perhaps you've heard of Charles Ponzi's famous scheme. The classic bubble has been repeated in various forms ever since, the chaos left in their wake threatening recently to topple protocapitalist states emerging from communist Europe.

Ivar Kreuger built a marvelous bubble out of a match company early in this century, but it collapsed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash.

Pyramid Schemes (like the "Make Money Fast" epidemic) - Ponzi on a Xerox budget - are only a percentage of the many scams to proliferate on-line. My favorite so far: the Sexygirls Scam, in which a "free" program for viewing naughty pictures secretly used users modems to call pricy toll-numbers in Moldova.

Check out The 419 Coalition's page for information about the Nigerian Scam, and read up on how Barry Minkow has capitalized on his conviction for the ZZZZ Best bubble by going on the business ethics lecture circuit. A tip of the hat also to the scam artists who called themselves the Baron and Baroness von Bressensdorf and were able to afford a titled lifestyle by keeping an investment house bubble going for almost 50 years before their recent arrests in North Carolina.

A fellow named James Reavis used patient cunning to plant documents hither and yon which seemed to give him an open and shut legal claim to almost the entire state of Arizona. Read the amazing and amusing story of The Man Who Stole Arizona - you won't be disappointed.

Governments are swindles of the crude "protection racket" style that use the Stockholm Syndrome with panache to transform themselves from hated to wildly popular. They don't even play by their own rules - for instance, the local government of Washington, D.C. double-billed people for parking and traffic tickets, threatening to withhold auto registration or "boot" the cars of owners who did not pay up. Since 1981, D.C. has raked in $17.8 million with 829,000 illegitimate fines.

The ballad of Billie Sol Estes is an entertaining one. He manipulated federal farm aid programs and investors with a phantom fertilizer company back in the day, and evidently he's still up to no good.

P.T. Barnum's many scams were often more whimsical and entertaining than cynical and dishonest, which is not to say that he didn't pocket the cash at day's end with a smile on his face.

Enter Norman Tweed Whitaker, international chess master and con-man of mystery - tried to squeeze money out of the Lindberghs during the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, ended up doing time in Alcatraz.

Snake-oil salesmen have been a colorful part of the landscape since the beginning. Check out the weight-reduction eyeglasses and the foot-pumped breast enlarger at The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.

One of the best and brightest was Dr. John Romulus Brinkley whose name will be forever associated with the goat glands he surgically installed in the scrota of men who wanted to be as horny as the hooved ones. He rode the goat gland craze to media and political power, and remains perhaps the king of American quacks.

The town of Palisade, Nevada nurtured a tourist-attracting reputation as the toughest town in the American West for years by staging realistic gunfights for out-of-towners. And speaking of tourist attractions, a crash-landing flying saucer turned out to be just the thing to boost the economy of Roswell, New Mexico.

You can find out plenty on-line about The Dominion of Melchizedek, a wannabe island nation and home to many a sweet little fraud - perhaps a distant cousin to Drunvalo Melchezidek, who's on-line hawking holy super-ionized water (see also: laundry balls). And on the scam front also, though it ended up being a better media hack than a money maker, was www.ourfirsttime.com, which advertised that it would let web surfers watch two teenagers lose their respective virginities in live streaming video.

Also on-line is the FBI report on Harold Jesse Berney, who in the 1950s managed to get various people to invest over (U.S.) $50,000 in his plans to manufacture amazing machines he'd learned about on one of his trips to the planet Venus.

Barry Minkow
Barry Minkow

P.T. Barnum
P.T. Barnum

James Reavis
James Reavis

Charles Ponzi
Charles Ponzi

See also:

  • Impostors
  • Counterfeiting
  • Commerce Jamming
  • Art Forgery
  • Literary Forgery
  • The Great God Hoax
  • Pages referenced here:



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