The world's most notorious swindlers have much in common: many came from poor backgrounds and many were ingenious, as well as ruthless in their exploitation of victims.
Here are some of the most infamous scammers of all time, along with the stories behind their schemes: from an elaborate counterfeit ploy to the man who managed to illegitimately sell the Eiffel Tower.... twice .

Charles Ponzi - The Ponzi Scheme

Charles Ponzi was the infamous Italian criminal who scammed investors out of an estimated $7m in the early 1900s by passing on money from new investors to existing ones - while presenting the scam as a sustainable investment.
He did not invent the “Ponzi scheme” but the magnitude of his ploy led to his name being put before such scams.
In 1918 Ponzi was living in Boston. He got the idea for his scam when he received a letter from a Spanish company that contained an international reply coupon (IRC). The recipient could redeem this coupon for postage back to the sender’s country.
Ponzi spotted a way to cash in. He could buy the coupons in one country and exchange them for postage in another where the value was higher. Ponzi claimed he made over 400pc profit on some transactions.
Ponzi convinced friends to invest in the scheme and promised outrageous returns.
But in reality he was simply passing cash from new investors to existing ones - and the scheme could only continue for as long as new investors could be found in increasing numbers.
For a while it worked, and he managed to keep investors happy while pocketing millions of dollars himself. At his peak he was raking in $250,000 a day.
But The Boston Post started questioning the legitimacy of the scheme in 1920.
The scheme collapsed and Ponzi’s investors lost about $20m.
He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Kazutsugi Nami - L&G bedding bankruptcy

The chairman of a futon and food company called L&G (Ladies and Gentleman) was responsible for the biggest scam in Japanese history.
An estimated 37,000 people were believed to have been defrauded of more than $1.4bn in the early 2000s.
Kazutsugi Nami promised investors annual returns of more than 30pc.
He also invented his own digital currency called ‘Enten’.
Questions were quickly followed by lawsuits when, in 2007, he started paying dividends to investors in the form of Enten.
When he was arrested in 2009 he was asked if he was sorry.
He said: "Why do I have to apologise? I'm the poorest victim. Nobody lost more than I did. You should be aware that high returns come with a high risk."
He was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2010.

Frank Abagnale - 'Catch Me If You Can' imposter

Frank Abagnale’s story has been told many times. His biography explored his life as a self-taught imposter and master forger of cheques.
It was made into the 2002 film, Catch Me If You Can starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale.
The musical version opened on Broadway in 2011.
Abagnale started dabbling in fraud as a teenage runaway in 1960s New York.
At 16, he changed the date on his driver’s licence to make himself older and then started altering cheques and cashing them.
He began posing as pilots and doctors among other aliases as he discovered uniforms worked in his favour.
By the time he was old enough to drink, he had cashed approximately $2.5m in fake cheques through his various guises.
At 21, he had settled in France and was arrested. He spent five years in French, Swedish and American prisons.
He was released on the condition that he would help the US government understand his fraudulent methods. He has been working for the FBI for over 35 years.

,..

Victor Lustig - The man who sold the Eiffel Tower... twice

“Count” Victor Lustig’s was fluent in five different languages and had many aliases throughout the 1900s.
He was born in 1890 in a town called Hostinné, which is now part of the Czech Republic.
As a teenager, he used to pick the pockets of the wealthy and learnt every card trick in the book.
Then he went big, with a fraud involving the Eiffel Tower.
The iconic landmark was in need of repair and some Parisians wanted it gone.
Lustig managed to forge government credentials and sold the tower to a scrap metal dealer for $70,000.
When the dealer discovered he’d been had, he was too embarrassed to go to the police.
Months later, Lustig pulled the same stunt again.
Another of Lustig’s cons was to sell his “money duplicating machine” to rich opportunists.
In 1930, a large scale counterfeit operation saw him release $100,000 ($1,432,700 today) of bogus notes into the US economy each week.
Lustig was eventually caught in 1935 when his girlfriend, who suspected him of having an affair, turned him in.
On the day before his trial, he tied together bed sheets and escaped from the Federal Detention Headquarters in Manahattan.
Police found him a month later in Pittsburgh and he was sentenced to 20 years in Alcatraz.
He died in prison in 1947.

Bernard Madoff - former stockbroker turned fraudster

Bernard Madoff came from humble beginnings.
He started up his own investment company in 1960 with $5,000 he earned from his jobs as a lifeguard and sprinkler installer, and a further $50,000 from his in-laws.
Almost 50 years later in 2009, Madoff had swindled investors out of £65bn and pleaded guilty to one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history.
Madoff didn’t overstretch himself by offering unsustainably high returns to everyone.
Instead, he worked with a small, elite circle and promised to match the returns of the S&P 500, an index of the largest American companies.
Madoff kept it up for years.
But in the financial crisis of 2008 the market was deteriorating and clients were keen to liquidate their assets.
Madoff confessed to his sons who turned him into the FBI.
In 2009, 70-year-old Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison

Charles Keating - The Lincoln Savings and Loan scam

Charles H. Keating Jnr was a World War Two pilot, a champion swimmer and a devout church-goer.
He was also a successful property investor.
But he scammed 23,000 investors out of $250m.
In 1984, Keating bought Lincoln Savings and Loans, a small and conservative mortgage lender based in California.
Industry regulations had been relaxed in the early 1980s and businesses were able to take more risks with depositor’s cash.
Keating exploited this and invested savers' cash in high risk ventures, without telling depositors their cash was at risk.
Keating lived the life of a corporate executive, travelling by private jet and throwing ostentatious parties. He also gave $1m to Mother Teresa.
The business failed in 1989. Thousands of elderly investors were left with worthless bonds.
Keating was convicted of fraud and served four-and-half years in prison.
He died in 2014 aged 90.

Artur Virgilio Alves Reis - The Portuguese Bank Note Crisis

Portuguese fraudster Artur Virgilio Alves Reis was responsible for the worst case of counterfeiting known by any government to date.
His large-scale scam, known as the Portuguese Bank Note Crisis, was so significant many believe it contributed to the collapse of the Portuguese Republic in 1926.
Reis was serving time in prison for forging cheques and arms dealing when he dreamed up the scheme.
Posing as a Bank of Portugal representative and armed with a forged contract, Reis convinced a London-based company to print him his own banknotes.
He claimed it was part of a secret project to financially aid Angola, then a struggling Portugese colony.
The printers obliged and Reis injected the equivalent of £1,007,963 in fake notes into the Portugest economy.
Reis opened his own bank to launder the funds. .
It all crumbled in 1925 when 28-year-old Reis was arrested. He tried to forge documents to suggest the Bank of Portugal was involved in the scam.
He was released in 1935 and died in poverty in 1945.
Portugal was unstable before the Bank Note Crisis but many believe it worsened the situation by stoking inflation, weakening the currency and destroying confidence in the government.

Kweku Adoboli

The Ghanian national and Nottingham University graduate Kweku Adoboli was once regarded as an integral part of UBS’ British investment arm. His short-lived success, however, came to an abrupt end in September 2011 shortly after he delivered an email to the bank’s accountant, reading: “I take full responsibility for my actions and the shit storm that will now ensue. I am deeply sorry to have left this mess for everyone and to have put my bank, and my colleagues at risk.”
A year on and Adoboli had been sentenced to seven years in jail, erased $4.5bn from the bank’s share price, and prompted the firm’s then Chief Executive Oswald Gruebel to resign with immediate effect. The 32-year up-and-comer, it was revealed, had engaged in various off-the-book activities throughout his time at UBS, which involved him gambling away $2.3bn in unauthorised trades – the largest illegitimate trading loss in British history.
Adoboli’s swift rise through the ranks saw his annual salary turn from £30,000 in 2003 to £200,000 plus bonuses by 2008, during which time he learnt how to manipulate financial records and hide his losses. The scandal served only to accentuate UBS’s lacklustre investment business, which had not long beforehand been made to write off $50bn in bad mortgage loans and endure the brunt of the Libor scandal investigation.

Emmanuel Nwude
Emmanuel Nwude who committed the largest fraud in Nigeria by selling a non-existent airport to a Brazilian for $242 million between 1995 and 1998.
Emmanuel Nwude carried out one of the the biggest banking fraud in the world.
The rise of internet fraud commonly known as 419 is one phenomenon Nigeria has come to be associated it. Before internet fraud became a global issue, Nwude had committed one of the biggest scams in the world.
How was Emmanuel Nwude able to carry out this jaw-dropping scam and convince Nelson Sakaguchi who was the director of the bank to part with so much money for the purchase of an airport?
Nwude was a former director of Union Bank of Nigeria and this position made him privy to some links, information and documents that other persons would not be aware of. He impersonated the then governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Paul Ogwuma, and connected with Sakaguchi informing him of a mouth-watering deal of Nigeria’s plan to build an airport in Abuja.
Nwude, pretending to be the Central Bank of Nigeria governor, told Sakaguchi that he stood of chance of pocketing $10 million commission when the deal passed through. Sakaguchi paid $191 million in cash and the remainder in the form of outstanding interest.
Nwude’s accomplices were Emmanuel Ofolue, Nzeribe Okoli, and Obum Osakwe, along with the husband and wife duo, Christian Ikechukwu Anajemba and Amaka Anajemba, with Christian later being assassinated.
The criminal gang was able to convince the director of the Brazilian bank to part with the money.

source-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/the-most-notorious-financial-frauds-in-history/artur-virgilio-alves-reis/
https://www.worldfinance.com/strategy/legal-management/10-of-the-most-controversial-financial-fraudsters
https://www.naij.com/1100779-the-story-emmanuel-nwude-carried-biggest-scam-nigeria.html

APC coming to power in Nigeria.

i trust Nigeria to make the list