1. In 1996, a Canadian mining company, Bre-X, announced a huge discovery of gold, and in the process went from a penny stock to $280 per share, with a total value of $4 billion. In reality, it was all a fraud and the lead geologist was shaving off gold from his wedding band to add to drill-core samples.
2. Founded in 1985, the Enron Corporation claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000 and employed approximately 20,000 staff. But the real value of the company was exposed at the end of 2001, after which the company was declared bankrupt. Enron was responsible for wiping out over $78 billion in stock market value.
3. In 1821, a Scotsman, Gregor MacGregor, invented a fictional Central American republic called “Poyais” and convinced hundreds of people in his home country of Scotland to invest in the nonexistent country, and even oversaw the deployment of a ship of 250 people hoping to start a new life in Poyais. When their ship arrived, they found nothing but undeveloped, inhospitable jungle.
4. In the early 1990s, the infamous Italian criminal Charles Ponzi scammed investors out of about $7 million by passing on new investors’ money to existing investors and presenting it as a sustainable investment,
In November 1920, Ponzi was sentenced to five years in prison
5. After buying the financial institution Lincon Savings and Loan Association, Charles Keating began investing savers’ cash in high-risk ventures without informing the depositors.For the next four years, Lincoln’s assets increased. It rose from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion.
The scam was revealed in 1989 after the business failed The scam left 23,000 customers with worthless bonds
6. In 1925, a Portuguese named Alves dos Reis forged a government contract authorizing him to print money and “officially” printed himself 100 million escudos, the equivalent of 0.88% of Portugal’s GDP at that time, leading to the “Portuguese Bank Note Crisis.”
7. In the 1920s, Ivar Kreuger, who owned banks, film companies, newspapers, mines, telephone companies, and railways, decided to form a monopoly to control all the world’s safety matches. International banks begged him to let them invest, not knowing that his many companies existed only on paper, profitable only because they were invested in each other.
8. Nigerian scammer Emmanuel Nwude once sold a fake airport to a major international bank for $242 million, and the scam wasn’t discovered until 3 years later.
9. When “Count” Victor Lustig discovered that the famous Eiffel Tower was in need of repairs, he faked some government papers and sold the tower to scrap metal dealers twice with a total of over $200,000 in bribes to throw the multi-million dollar contract their way.
10. From 1997 to 2002, over 4,000 people paid an advance fee in order to receive new cars at a fraction of their value. The cars supposedly came from the estate of a wealthy Christian man according to his will. The scheme took in over $ 21 million, but neither the deceased, his alleged will, an estate of any kind, or the cars ever existed