The namesake of the Ponzi Scheme, Charles Ponzi made an estimated $15M from running a fake international arbitrage scheme in the 1920s.

In the 1870s, a woman from Boston ran a Ponzi scheme disguised as a bank by women, for women that promised 8% interest.

Listen to an account of an 'airplane game' leader, a notorious, widespread illegal pyramid scheme that swept across the US in the 1980s.

The story of a bitcoin loophole that gave one man millions

James Parker discovered a glitch in an Australian cryptocurrency exchange that would allow him to cash in credits worth over $20M and make big gifts to his friends. Like most loopholes, the authorities found out, but not before his life was transformed. The first in a six-part series.

The long-lost art of coded postage stamps

In the 1800s, the postcard was a relatively new phenomenon, as was the post office. In the burgeoning system, recipients of mail had to sometimes pay prohibitively costly fees to receive it. So to get around the fees, a system of placing stamps on the envelopes in specific ways to communicate—a simple yes or no—was devised by clever mailers and expanded and codified by postcard companies into guides. Learn about the fascinating system here.

After an estimated $8B in customer funds were lost through a cryptocurrency scheme likened to a Ponzi scheme, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

How a 19th-century aristocrat scammed the rich to buy fake Caribbean land

Nearly 200 years ago, Gregor MacGregor pulled off one of the most brazen real estate scams in history. A disgraced military leader, MacGregor sold plots of land in what is today Honduras, touting the country of Poyais as a new major region in South America. But no building was taking place, and instead of investing the proceeds of bond sales in construction, MacGregor was lining his pockets. Read the unbelievable story of MacGregor's exploits here.

Explore fun facts from the USPS, including unique post office buildings, a stamp that traveled past Pluto, and more.

Mark Twain had many gripes with the US Postal Service

Twain often complained about the cost of postage and the service's inefficiencies, often sharing these criticisms in newspaper opinion pieces. Still, in 1907, the USPS issued a commemorative stamp featuring his face.

A couple was once sent to prison for running a $31.8M extreme couponing fraud scheme

Investigators found fake coupons in “every crevice” of husband and wife duo Pacifico Talens Jr. and Lori Ann Talens’ home. The couple was sent to prison and are serving a combined 19 years.

Between 1989 and 2001, a security guard dubbed 'Uncle Jerry' rigged the McDonald's Monopoly sweepstakes by handing out 60 winning pieces worth more than $24M.

Governments have historically used counterfeiting for economic warfare

Inserting fake currency into an economy can help destabilize it. During the American Revolution, for instance, the British distributed counterfeit “Continental Dollars” in an effort to devalue the currency being used in the US at the time with the goal of undermining America’s growing financial credibility. The Nazis also ran an extensive counterfeiting scheme during WWII.

A mysterious man named Emmerich Juettner once produced thousands of counterfeit $1 bills

After his wife died in 1937, Juettner fell into financial trouble and soon began replicating $1 bills. These bills aren’t typically prime targets for counterfeiting given their low value.

The Medicis of Italy innovated 'bills of exchange,' precursors to checks

At the time, lending money for interest (also known as usury) was banned in much of the Christian world. The enterprising Medicis developed bills of exchange to allow merchants to promise payment without cash or coin (with some discrete means of earning interest woven in). Learn more about how this family laid the foundation for modern banking.

Soybean oil fraud almost decimated American Express in 1963

A New York commodities trader who had defrauded the American government over uninspected meat for school lunches, Anthony "Tino" De Angelis, used American Express warehouses to sell soybean oil. However, Angelis had actually filled the tanks with water and placed just enough soybean oil on top of the tanks to pass inspection. American Express was liable for many of the tanks and its stock faced a huge downturn, opening the door for a then 33-year-old Warren Buffett to make his first purchase in the company.

American Express is credited with inventing the traveler's check

In the 1890s, then American Express President James C. Fargo was frustrated that he couldn't get cash while traveling in Europe outside of major cities. Marcellus Berry, an American Express employee, came up with the idea of a traveler's "cheque": a prepaid check, similar to cash, that requires the signature of both the customer and the receiving institution to be valid. American Express never modernized the spelling of the word "cheque" and stopped providing them at the end of 2020.

JP Morgan Jr. once angered the nation with his zero-dollar tax bill

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Congress learned that Morgan and his banking partners had avoided paying any federal income tax in 1931 and 1932. By claiming their losses in the stock market, they seemingly erased what they owed.

The FBI estimates that $1B is lost to international romance scammers through fake online relationships each year.

The word ‘coupon’ comes from a French word meaning ‘to cut’

The history of coupons starts in the US with the Coca-Cola coupon that was mailed to consumers, offering them a chance to come try the soda for free in a nearby pharmacy. A coupon created by cereal company Post is one of the earliest widely cited follow-ups—it offered a penny off a box of Grape Nuts in 1909.

In 1882, American Express began offering money orders to compete with the US Postal Service

Money orders were American Express' first move into financial services. USPS launched its money order service in 1864 as a way for Civil War soldiers to send money back home. Between the 1880s and 1920s, immigration into the United States surged;the American Express money order service gave immigrants a way to send money to family members living in other countries.

Often dubbed the 'king of bank robbers,' George Leonidas Leslie stole an estimated $7M (equivalent to $200M today) and charged other criminals a $20K fee to evaluate their heist plans

Leslie studied architecture and used blueprints of safes and banks to execute meticulously planned bank heists across the Northeast between 1869 and 1878. Although Leslie was an infamous bank robber by night, he posed as a member of high society by day, providing critical intel on the institutions he'd rob and helping conceal his crimes. Months before his largest planned heist, where he planned to turn on his gang, Leslie's body mysteriously washed up along the Hudson River. His killer remains a mystery.

One man lost roughly $100K to a con artist—then turned it into a business

The victim of the con now helps other victims of similar crimes. He's also written a book and hosts a podcast on the subject.

The WWII passport forgers who saved thousands of Jewish lives

Amid the chaos of Hitler's authoritarian Europe in World War II, Polish diplomats based in Switzerland used the classic toolkit of thieves to help free thousands of Jews: they perfected the art of forgery, faking passports secretly donated by sympathetic Latin American countries. Read the incredible tale of heroism here.

Jim Simons, mathematician turned government codebreaker turned trader, revolutionized quantitative investing

The late Jim Simons is remembered as one of the most successful (and profitable) hedge fund managers of all time. He went from physically gathering microfilm on commodities pricing decades ago to overseeing a firm that led Wall Street in daily trading volume.

In 2025, American Express paid $230M to settle fraud and deceptive marketing charges

American Express launched a wire payment service targeted at small businesses and falsely touted the service as a tax-deductible business expense in 2018. American Express was also accused of allowing small businesses to open corporate credit cards without the necessary employer identification number (EIN).

A man who counterfeited over $1M explains how to counterfeit money

In 2019, after Jeff Turner forged US banknotes such as the 1996-series $100 bill and the 2013 “blue note,” he was indicted on federal conspiracy and served 10 months in prison. In this video, Turner explains how to spot a fake banknote, and provides information about the materials and processes required to make fake money.

The quiz show scandals eroded trust in the media

Many viewers were attracted to the shows because they were filled with real people winning real money. After it was exposed that “Dotto,” “Twenty-One,” “The $64,000 Question,” and others had been fixed, the genre struggled to regain viewers’ trust. The government intervened, too: President Eisenhower called the shows’ deception “a terrible thing to do to the American people” and Congress amended the Communications Act in 1960, explicitly outlawing fraudulent game shows.

Famous scammer Anna Delvey lied about having a $67M trust fund

Delvey conned New York City’s elite with her lies, saying that she was a German heiress and defrauding the city’s banks, restaurants, and more out of more than $275K in just 10 months. Her story was even turned into a Netflix series while she was in prison.

Thomas and Anne Rogers were famous counterfeiters in 17th-century England

The pair used a practice called “coin clipping,” shaving the edges off silver coins to decrease their weight before sending them back into circulation. When banknotes rather than coins gained popularity, counterfeiting methods evolved—in the 1700s, an early banknote counterfeiter named Mary Butterworth created counterfeit paper money using starched cloth and a hot iron to transfer the pattern of a banknote onto paper.

Monopoly was based on the satirical Landlord's Game, which criticized the abilities Monopoly rewarded.

Many startup founders pull out-of-the-box stunts to get their businesses off the ground

Do you know Airbnb’s founders used cereal (yes, as in the breakfast food) to secure their initial round of funding? Or that PayPal’s founders once gave out free money to get people to sign up for the platform? These stories might be crazy, but they’re not uncommon.

Colonial Americans used tobacco, wampum, and land-backed notes to solve a chronic coin shortage

British coins rarely circulated in the colonies due to an unfavorable trade balance, forcing colonists to improvise. They traded in Spanish dollars, Native American shells, tobacco warehouse receipts, and eventually paper money backed by land rather than gold.

The strange, unsolved story of Filippo Bernardini and the stolen book manuscripts

Over the last five years, a mysterious figure has been stealing manuscripts, often unpublished, from individuals and organizations in the publishing industry across three continents. The scammer, later identified as Filippo Bernardini, was an...

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

British economist John Maynard Keynes originally proposed a global currency called the bancor

Keynes—one of the chief architects of the Bretton Woods system—proposed establishing a global central bank that would issue a new international currency, the bancor, to settle trade imbalances. The idea was rejected in favor of the US dollar serving as the main currency of the international system.

American Express briefly owned Lehman Brothers

In 1984, Shearson, a retail banking company and American Express subsidiary, bought the investment banking company Lehman Brothers—best known for its historic 2008 collapse—for $360M. The businesses were then called Shearson Lehman/American Express. American Express spun off Lehman Brothers with an IPO in 1994 that attracted nearly $3B in new capital.

In 1931-32, JP Morgan Jr. paid no income taxes due to his company’s losses

This legally reduced his taxable income under existing laws. Similarly, the Rockefellers leveraged charitable foundations to minimize taxes, allowing them to preserve wealth while directing funds to their preferred causes.

Why America is obsessed with the stories of scammers

A "grifter" is someone who exploits systems at a high level. Notable cases like fake heiress Anna Delvey, Fyre Festival creator Billy McFarland, and startup faker Elizabeth Holmes, who deceived their way to success, captivate our culture. These...

The South Sea Bubble was an 18th-century scandal that redefined speculation

This video illustrates how the South Sea Company in Britain sparked a stock boom in 1720, with promises of huge trading profits, driving shares to unprecedented heights before a sudden crash wiped out the fortunes of investors—including Isaac Newton, who lost an estimated £20K.

A Chinese-Mexican alliance marked one of history's largest nonviolent money laundering schemes

In 2019, Chinese-American gangster Xizhi Li was arrested for an expansive money laundering scheme spanning four continents. Li reportedly laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for cartel members, wealthy Chinese Americans, and other foreign countries.