Author: Joseph T Wells
ISBN No:
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher:
Year of publication:
Brief:
American white-collar criminologist Joseph T Wells, the man behind the Texas-based Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), has brought together a rogues' gallery.
That fraudsters and conmen have been diddling the rest of us throughout history – do you find that vaguely comforting, or frightening? American white-collar criminologist Joseph T Wells, the man behind the Texas-based Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), has brought together a rogues’ gallery if ever there was one in his book of the ten most notorious fraudsters of the 20th century – Frankensteins of Fraud. In the US it retails for $49; it was on sale at the recent ACFE conference on European fraud in London for œ40. That works out at œ4 a fraudster, which is pretty good value for money when you read some of the stories. What a motley collection of monsters.<br><br><strong>
From Cassie to Milken</strong><br><br>
There’s Cassie Chadwick (not her real name – she had to even deceive the rest of the world about that), a Canadian woman who lived on her wits and her good looks and made a mint before she was eventually put in a court room early in the 20th century to earn her place in the ten. Next comes Charles Ponzi, father of the Ponzi scheme that still has his name in whatever guise it takes – interesting that it has taken on a new lease of life thanks to the internet, still playing on people’s greed. Six of the ten are still alive, including Michael Milken, the man behind much that was bad in the 1980s Wall Street ‘greed is good’ boom. Mr Wells asks some common questions – what made these monsters tick? What exactly was the financial trickery they pulled off to make millions, billions of dollars (as is often the case with books by American authors, the characters are US-biased). What could have been done to avoid what Mr Wells calls ‘these financial atrocities?’ It’s not really a textbook, but more of a rattling good read – not original stuff either (a great book would be the ten greatest financial swindlers who were never caught!). It’s all come out in the open, but Mr Wells does us a service by putting so much financial wrong-doing inside one book cover. It’s simply a rattling good set of tales. The stories are so outrageous that Mr Wells could not fail to make them live, and he’s done a good job in telling it how it was. Mr Wells was in the FBI for several years and has written many books, so he knows what he is talking about and how to tell it.
Not a black and white world
Fraud investigators are not working in a black and white world of right and wrong – they are dealing with human frailties – and those frailties include extremely devious people who lie and cheat so well and so often that they cannot tell if they are telling the truth or not half the time. Take Cassie Chadwick, who started at 16 by stealing money from her mother to help her to pose as a debutante on holiday from Europe. When the authorities were closing in in Cleveland, Ohio, she said: ‘Public clamour has made me a sacrifice. Here I am, an innocent woman hounded into jail, while a score of businessmen in Cleveland would leave town tomorrow if I told all I knew. Yes I borrowed money, but what of it.’ Well, over the years she made up a train-load of aliases and borrowed millions to finance a lifestyle she hadn’t earned. And the men (mostly men, of course) who were defrauded by Cassie blamed her hypnotic eyes. Mr Wells and any financial investigator worth his salt will point out that that’s a cop-out. There’s all sorts of fraudsters – some start by not even meaning to do it, and get caught up in frauds to keep themselves above water. Some would love to stop. The big fish in this book, you suspect, rather liked doing it. At the recent ACFE two-day seminars in London, much thought was given to what motivates a fraudster – this book shows that fraud involves a kaleidoscope of motives, both on the part of those doing the fraud and those letting themselves be taken in by plausible well-spoken people. If you’re interested in this book or the many self-study workbooks, videos and CD-ROMs, see the website www.cfenet.com.
