The Forbes Reader Who Desperately Wanted To Learn How To Steal
After my first Forbes article about How To Steal A Lot of Money was published in 2012, one sly reader reached out for more personal coaching.
Last week, I wrote about what led me—in 2012—to write the first of a series of Forbes articles teaching readers how to steal like Wall Streeters and get away with it. After reading the first article in Forbes, an individual—who I called Duncan—initially contacted me with some comments and questions. My initial response was not enough for him.
Duncan wanted to learn more from this frustrated Master of Thievery and lost little time firing additional questions at me. A few days later I heard from him again.
“Thanks for the quick response. Glad to hear you’ll be coming out with a new article soon. I have a few questions if you do not mind. I have read your article dozens of times. I was particularly intrigued by your statement that “If you can come up with a far-fetched idea that transfers the investor’s wealth to you dollar-for-dollar, legally, you’ll never go hungry.” Purely for entertainment purposes, could you give me a detailed example of how such a scheme would operate? I am not in the investment business, I have no connections to the industry, but I love the thought that an Average Joe, like me, can emulate the Wall Street pigs.... Thanks for the “Entertainment.”
Clearly, Duncan, like most of America, needed no convincing that Wall Street was both greed-driven and no friend to investors. While there was a time (pre-1980s) when most Americans didn’t have investment accounts or buy stocks and bonds, today, Duncan knew, everyone is forced into the market. What else are you going to do—put your savings in a bank Certificate of Deposit earning a few percent interest? Investors have no choice but to invest or gamble in stocks. But after the dot com bust and housing bubble burst, and Wall Street and COVID-19 bailouts, everyone knows the market is rigged. Not just a little rigged—totally corrupt.
Duncan was not a believer in conspiracies generally but the evidence of systematic fraud spanning across the financial markets was and is indisputable. Connect the dots—the myriad scandals—and it’s irrefutable that widespread manipulation by insiders is possible and is happening.
Perhaps the single most disturbing feature of Wall Street is the fact that when dealing with the major investment houses, all but the dumbest of investors know full well that they are going to be taken advantage of, yet feel helpless to do anything about it. Unlike bovines in a cattle car on the way to the slaughterhouse, most humans strolling down Wall Street sense danger. There’s a feeling of impending doom like when dealing with a smarmy car salesman.
An institutional client of Goldman, Sachs once confided to me, “I know Goldman’s going to fuck me, I just want them to tell me when and how much it’s going to cost me.” With tens of billions at his fingertips, even this professional money manager felt powerless to stop the abuse.
Duncan grasped an important lesson from my first class at the online University of Stealing—a lesson I had only begun to learn myself: The story of how Wall Streeters successfully steal from investors is obviously depressing. Lives are ruined. It’s a gut-wrenchingly painful human tragedy. Yet these twisted tales involving greed, scams of seemingly infinite variety, and all-too-predictable outcomes, are also entertaining.
While truth is often stranger than fiction, investment fictions are the strangest of all truths.
Investment tall-tales are often larger than life itself.
While truth is often stranger than fiction, investment fictions are the strangest of all truths.
Investment tall-tales are often larger than life itself.
Who would believe one of the nation’s largest state investment funds would be so spectacularly stupid as to invest $50 million of workers’ disability money in a scam involving collectible toys stuffed with plastic pellets called Beanie Babies?
Sound far-fetched? It happened at the multi-billion-dollar Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation twenty years ago, despite my dire warnings to state officials running the fund.
“The state of Ohio had a mess on its hands when the world came tumbling down on Tom Noe, the disgraced GOP fundraiser and rare coin dealer who was convicted of twenty-nine felony counts including racketeering, theft, and forgery in the Coingate scandal.
The state sought how best to squeeze as much as possible out of the coins, sports trading cards, historical documents, and, yes, Beanie Babies that Noe had invested $50 million of the state's Bureau of Workers' Compensation money.”
In the end, only one of the bumbling state pension managers got jail time for the “Coingate” (aka Beanie Baby) debacle.
Better still, I had begun to realize that the more I appreciated the entertainment value of the nonsensical, bizarre behavior I encountered in my daily work, the less enraged I felt. If you can’t control the roller coaster, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Duncan “got” that investment follies offered a rich vein of entertainment gold to be mined. When Duncan confided that he loved the idea of being able to copy “Wall Street pigs,” I knew exactly what he meant.
The world often appears to be divisible into two camps. On one side are the honest, law-abiding innocents with whatever savings they’ve scraped together through hard work, or luck. On the other are the powerful, often corporate, savvy insiders laser-focused upon separating workers from the fruits of their labor. Understanding the tricks rich and powerful investment insiders use to sucker others is quite an accomplishment. Better still, if you can actually replicate the ruses on your own, you join the lofty ranks of the financial wizards, i.e., the puppet masters who pull invisible strings that ensnare others below. Your mastery of the art of thievery permits you to saddle, harness, mount, and ride the wealth-devouring savage stallion into the sunset.
Understanding the tricks rich and powerful investment insiders use to sucker others is quite an accomplishment. Better still, if you can actually replicate the ruses on your own, you join the lofty ranks of the financial wizards, i.e., the puppet masters who pull invisible strings that ensnare others below. Your mastery of the art of thievery permits you to saddle, harness, mount, and ride the wealth-devouring savage stallion into the sunset.
Duncan wanted a sneak peek at Wall Street’s secret playbook—to have a fair chance to make money like the vampires at Goldman Sachs.
That’s why he contacted me.
He knew I’d been on Wall Street, that I was well-versed in the rules of the game and had even helped write the playbook. Half the battle, Duncan rightly figured, is finding someone with the knowledge you seek. Harder still is getting the individual with the requisite expertise to share what he knows with would-be victims, as opposed to using insider tricks to his own financial advantage.
Duncan and I kept communicating generally by email and occasionally by phone. He pressed me for another installment in the series.
By May of 2012—about two months after the original How to Steal article in Forbes—I noticed that the number of readers had skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands. The time was ripe to write the second part in the series, I figured.
My second article advanced the hypothesis that there was a perfect victim for every crime and offered suggestions as to how to find the ideal victims.
How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part II in a Series
Forbes, May 16, 2012
In Part I of this series I postulated that crime does pay far better than historic accounts would lead you to believe because many of the largest financial crimes, occurring virtually daily, go unreported. However, I warned would-be thieves that careful planning is required to increase the odds of success. Studying past successful scams can be informative.
The problem is, if the best crimes are not reported, i.e., made public, how is the would-be criminal mastermind to learn his craft? Everyone has heard about Madoff—because he got caught and is in prison. You want to learn from Madoff-size scammers who are living the good life in Palm Beach, without fear of prosecution.
Hopefully, this series of articles will provide you with enough information about unreported financial crimes to send you on your way to becoming the greatest swindler of the new decade.
“Intelligent thieves get their hands on buckets of other people’s money without the use of force and prey upon victims that will almost certainly not report the criminal taking.” I explained that the first part of this equation, getting victims to willingly part with their money, is easy for those involved in the securities brokerage, investment advisory, commercial and private banking, legal, real estate, and other professions—most of which do not require even a high school diploma.
(Of course, if you need to fabricate educational and other credentials, it’s never been that hard and is getting easier all the time. In the 1960s my father used to say, “Twenty years after the war, every soldier was a colonel … according to his resume.”)
In short, position yourself in a profession where clients routinely hand over their money for big-ticket purchases (e.g. houses, boats, planes, etc.), or investment purposes.
Identifying a victim who will never report the crime, or come after you for their money requires a bit of twisted logic. Do such suckers really exist? You bet they do and once you apply common sense to defining the perfect victim you’ll soon be coming up with more potential pigeons that I ever imagined.
Perfect victims are important but you’ll also want to tailor your crime to your victims. Perfect crimes for perfect victims, is our goal. More about perfect crimes later.
While testifying in the Madoff cases I learned that certain Madoff victims who had lost billions had not filed claims with the trustee. Billions unclaimed? Why? These losers were foreigners who had not paid taxes in their home countries on the amounts they invested with Bernie and, therefore, could not come forward to assert a claim without risking prosecution.
Use the tax laws to your advantage: the more your clients have to worry about possible tax penalties or prosecution themselves, the less likely they’ll come after you.
My investigations of private banks operating in the US that cater to wealthy foreigners, particularly Edge banks, have led me to conclude that these banks have been able to continue to offer phenomenally uncompetitive investment products and services to clients, because their clients are primarily concerned with laundering their tens of millions in assets, or evading taxes. The rate of return on the assets invested is only a secondary concern and even when these customers discover they’ve been hosed, they don’t sue the bank. A comparison of the fines banks pay, versus the profits they earn, from laundering money should convince you that this time-tested swindle is worthy of emulation.
Charities, which are entirely or largely funded by voluntary donations, may be reluctant to go public with allegations of fraud.
I have observed that investment scammers often cozy up to charities, by making substantial contributions and volunteering. The charity itself may be a target; however, more often, a relationship with the charity puts the scammer in close proximity to other wealthy donors.
If the charity is your target, you may want to think twice about ripping-off members of the board of the charity as well. They may be less forgiving if they, as well as the charity, have been fleeced. Further, if you steal too much, the charity may have no choice but to go after you, despite any donor fall-out. My advice: Don’t push your luck. Steal a few million from the charity and leave the board members alone.
As in all thieving, you must assess the victim’s propensity to prosecute; the strength of your relationship with the victim and the amount you can safely, shall we say, misappropriate. I have witnessed, to my amazement, investment scammers who have stolen 100% of an investor’s retirement savings, who the investor still considers a friend. Con artists know that relationships must be nourished, if they are to survive despite devastating financial revelations.
Private and public pensions in particular, are ideal victims, for a plethora of reasons that I will discuss in the next installment of this series.
There’s more to the story coming soon...
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