Fraud Facts

A man secretly outsourced his programming job to China. He filled his work day watching cat videos, surfing Reddit and Facebook. Before being caught and fired, he made hundreds of thousands.

In 1997, a 23-year-old French con artist convinced a Texas family he was their missing teenage son — despite having brown eyes instead of blue, a heavy French accent, and being a completely different person. He lived with them for months before a private investigator uncovered the truth.

In 1987, American Airlines sold a lifetime unlimited first-class pass for $250,000. Steven Rothstein bought one. He flew over 10,000 flights. Breakfast in London, dinner in Tokyo. He even booked a fake passenger named "Bag Rothstein" to keep the adjacent seat empty. American Airlines estimates he cost them over $21 million before they revoked his pass — and handed him the termination letter at the gate.

Al Pacino didn't sign his own checks. His accountant did. By his 70s, his $50 million fortune was gone. He was unknowingly paying for 16 cars, 23 cellphones, and a $400,000-per-year landscaper at a house he never lived in. The accountant got seven and a half years in prison. Pacino had to take roles in movies he openly disliked — including Jack and Jill — just to pay the bills.

In 1925, con man Victor Lustig forged government documents, posed as a ministry official, and convinced six scrap metal dealers that the French government was secretly selling the Eiffel Tower for scrap. He "sold" it to the highest bidder. The victim was so humiliated he never went to police. So Lustig went back to Paris and sold it a second time.

A software update at a Nebraska gas station in November 2022 accidentally left a hidden demo mode active - and Dawn Thompson found it. Double-swiping her rewards card triggered the mode, letting the pump run without charging. She used it 510 times over six months, taking 7,413 gallons of fuel worth $27,860. She was arrested in March 2024.

Two anonymous traders bet on the weather in Paris through prediction market Polymarket, then allegedly walked to an unguarded Meteo-France sensor at Charles de Gaulle Airport and heated it with a hair dryer. The sensor spiked several degrees in seconds - far outside anything a forecast predicted. Together they walked away with over $35,000. Polymarket paid out in full and kept the bets valid.