Dan Davies: Lying for Money. How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World (2018)

Former stock analyst Dan Davies has categorized and compiled in Lying for Money various frauds that people throughout history have used to try to extract money from others. Some of the scams date back to ancient times, when, for example, seafarers would take out insurance on their ship and then claim it had sunk, simply painting a new name over the old one. The scams are presented in an order where the first ones are the easiest to understand, progressing toward more complex ones. For example, it is easy to understand that it is unequivocally wrong to take out a loan and intentionally fail to pay it back. More difficult concepts include various control frauds that are not committed against an individual or a company, but against the market. If, for instance, a bank manager gets filthy rich by setting unrealistically high targets for their subordinates to sell loans to consumers, and rank-and-file employees therefore skip checking the customers' creditworthiness, eventually driving…