Many financial companies went bankrupts because of their excessive greed and professional scammers. Scammers do not get tired of deceiving honest and respectable citizens, some even manage to swindle world’s biggest financial establishments. Even though, in most cases, they end up in prison cells. We decided to recall the biggest scams of all time and remind: each of us can fall into a financial trap.
Charity scams became so regular all over the world that most people do not recognize that they have been scammed. How does it work? You are too shy to check if the charity organization has all the necessary documents. You donate a small sum of money and never get to know whether they reached those poor or ill kids or not. Charity scams are far from being the biggest scams in history. However, they are rather successful at making money fooling people.
Another popular scam, although it is not one of the biggest internet scams, is dating scam or marriage scam.
International marriage agencies give their clients recommendations on how avoid marriage scammers from Russia. Some organizations even post information on trusted websites, saying that romancecompass scams are nothing but a myth, for example, or other important information.
Most of the correspondence between the grooms and the fake brides looks comical. “My dear, I understand that there is a lot of deception on the Internet, but I really want to meet with you and am ready to provide any evidence that I'm not some Nigerian guy. I will book the flight on January 9, the visa is 110 pounds. Together – 330 pounds. I need 440 pounds for us to meet! I bet, 400 pounds is a lot of money for you. But are you ready to lose me for it? You are my love!” After reading such a touching message, Brian from London transfers Larissa from Moscow the required amount, and she disappears.
Even though romancecompass scam and a few other trusted services scams are myths, some dating services are true scammers. Fraudsters continue to lure foreigners’ money, using their romantic interest in Slavic girls.
There are a lot of materials on the Internet about the most exciting and innovative projects on Kickstarter, and they are really great. But today we want to talk about scammers who are also rather popular on Kickstarter.
Laser Razor
The creators of Skarp Laser Razor promised to develop a full-fledged laser razor. As a proof they made a prototype and shot a promo video showing how it worked. However, neither experts nor the administration of Kickstarter considered this video as convincing evidence that the company will be able to realize the project. 4 million dollars were already collected, and Kickstarter blocked the project, and did not give them money. Skarp decided to switch to Indiegogo and work it out there.
Zano
This is one of the biggest online scams, but still sounds romantic and inspiring. The design of this miniature drone was really ambitious: the drone could be placed in the palm of your hand, but at the same time it could track the location of its owner and follow him. Torquing Group claimed they needed only $ 190,000 for production, they collected them in 10 days and were so excited that they decided to add a few more functions such as high-resolution video shooting, face recognition, 360-degree video shooting, etc. As a result, the project collected more than $ 3.5 million. The first batch of devices (received with a big delay) failed. Customers were very disappointed: Zano could hardly stay in the air, bumped into the walls and could not shoot high-quality video. In October, Torquing Group promised to deliver corrected versions of drones to the customers in a few months, but in mid-November they announced their bankruptcy. It turned out that they not only spent all the funds collected at Kickstarter, but still owe creditors $ 1.5 million.
Here is one of the biggest money making scams. The name of Bernard Madoff is known to everyone today, as the largest financial scandal is associated with it. Forbes eloquently calls him the thief of the century. After all, financial fraud dealt with the former chairman of the board of directors of the Nasdaq stock exchange. Madoff Securities, founded about 40 years ago, has brought its customers a stable profit at the level of 12-13% per annum for many years.
But in the end, the Madoff Company, which in fact was a financial pyramid, lost $50 billion. The key thing here is that regular checks of the financial activity of the company provided by the Federal Securities Commission showed only minor violations. According to unofficial data, some insider information helped the company survive. Paradoxically, over the long years of existence, the scammer’s company has not committed a single transaction on the stock exchange.
How did the company manage to stay afloat for such a long time? Thanks to the contributions of the members of the foundation. As a result, when publics got to know that the company's financial affairs were bad, many customers went broke. The victims of Madoff are American and international foundations and banks, including BNP Paribas, HSBC, Nomura Holdings, as well as wealthy Americans, for example, Steven Spielberg, the film director. This fraud shocked Wall Street. The French investor, who invested about $ 1.5 billion in Madoff, committed suicide in his New York office.