I have just finished reading the FT’s excellent recent story on Gérard Lhéritier, the French manuscript dealer who raised a $1 billion fund based on selling shares in priceless literary artefacts — before the whole thing was unravelled as an (allegedly) fraudulent Ponzi scheme in 2025. What was notable about Lhéritier (besides the strange footnote that he also won France’s biggest ever EuroMillions jackpot in 2007) was how much of a fixture of polite Parisian society he was: a well-tailored, patrician presence who was a respected sponsor of the National Library of France. It reminded me of something a friend who works in finance once explained to me: that a good proportion (maybe even the majority) of Ponzi schemes go entirely undetected. That, statistically speaking, at least a few of the most respected financiers and fund managers in the game must surely at some point have employed Ponzi-esque practices — taking from Peter to pay Paul, essentially — before landing the plane at the last minute and legitimising their business entirely. When you put it like that, it can sound almost acceptable — just another ‘fake it till you make it’ element of our modern hustle culture. (And besides, ‘Ponzi’ sounds so chic and Italianate. “Oh, this tie? It’s vintage Ponzi…” ) But setting up a Ponzi scheme is the easy bit. You promise handsome returns, and foolhardy investors give you their money accordingly, and then you pay them out based on the deposits of further, later foolhardy investors, and the wheel turns. The problem, of course, is getting out. Here are five of the most notable fraudsters who didn’t.
So good, he put his name on it! Ponzi was by no means the first practitioner of the swindle (an example appears in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, in fact.) But he was perhaps the most brazen. In 1920, a wannabe financier called Charles Ponzi, operating in Boston, promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days of investment or a 100% profit within 90 days. He was inundated with business. At one point, more than 75% of the city’s police force had put their savings with him, and the government feared his fund’s collapse could pull down the entire Boston banking market. At his peak, he was making $1 million a day — or over $16 million in 2026 dollars. Shortly after this high it all came tumbling down, and Ponzi was soon sent to federal prison. At the end of his life, he was unrepentant. “Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice, I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks just to watch me put the thing over…”
Madoff was Wall Street royalty — the Belgian-loafered former chairman of NASDAQ; the sensible greybeard in a world of gallivanting wolfs. Investors loved him, in fact, precisely because he seemed so dull. His proposal was almost laughably simple, in hindsight at least: steady, uncannily consistent returns, year after year, regardless of what the wider markets were doing. But in reality there was almost no investing being done at all. Client money was deposited into a basic Chase bank account and shuffled around a bit, while fake account statements — printed on old IBM machines, situated on a hidden floor in his vast building — created the illusion of profitable trades. The scheme collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis, when wider market anxieties caused many clients to withdraw their cash at once. By that point, Madoff had fabricated roughly $65 billion in account balances, making his the largest Ponzi scheme in history. When his sons finally turned him in in September of that year, Madoff told them: “It’s one big lie.” He was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison, where he died in 2021.
It’s ironic that Allen Stanford was such a huge cricket fan (at one point, just before the end, he had an international tournament named after him) — that sport with fair play and integrity at its core. Operating out of Antigua, Stanford styled himself as sort of playboy guru, convincing investors that his private offshore bank offered impossibly safe, high-yield certificates of deposit that consistently outperformed the market. He raised more than $7 billion with this pitch — most of which went to financing his lavish lifestyle and executing a few moody property deals. Things unraveled quickly in 2009, just after the global financial crisis. At Stanford’s trial, prosecutors described the scheme as “a massive fraud wrapped in velvet.” He was sentenced to 110 years in federal prison in Florida, and will be eligible for release in 2105.
Lou Pearlman first made proper money flying advertising blimps. On a bad day, he could have doubled for one. A vast, puffy mogul with a cigar like a truncheon, Pearlman entered the public consciousness as the discoverer/ inventor of The Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, who made him millions from their platinum-selling records. But he was also running an extremely convoluted Ponzi scheme, in which investors believed they were buying stakes in airlines, travel businesses, and advertising empires. In reality, most of the companies barely existed. The great irony was that Pearlman was using his pop-world cachet to get banks and investors to give him hundreds of millions — while simultaneously hugely underpaying the very boy bands making him famous. When the fraud finally collapsed in 2006, investigators uncovered more than $300 million in losses and described his empire as essentially “a giant shell game with a soundtrack.” Pearlman fled the country before being captured in Indonesia, and was later sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. He died there in 2016.
Ignatova liked to call herself the “Cryptoqueen” and swanned around accordingly — preaching to her devoted subjects in velvet ball gowns at state-like banquets. Her main claim was that her newly minted OneCoin would soon surpass Bitcoin in value — and create a new financial world order in the process. Millions of ordinary people poured over $4 billion into what was soon unmasked as a pretty simple pyramid scheme. OneCoin didn’t even have its own blockchain. At the height of the frenzy, Ignatova’s cultish believers quit jobs, emptied savings accounts, and pressured their relatives to jump on the bandwagon. It crumbled as quickly as these things always do. In 2017, just as authorities closed in, Ignatova boarded a flight from Sofia to Athens — and promptly vanished. She’s not been seen since, and is currently listed by the FBI as one of its most wanted fugitives.
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Issue 17
With paparazzi revolts, fake dead pigeons, canine Palme d’Ors and Lars von Trier melting down on cue, no film festival does spectacle quite like Cannes — where glamour, chaos and absurdity have always shared the same red carpet.
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