Scams Scams Scams
All scams and frauds have a single motive: To stash in cash. Do you know about the biggest accounting scandal of all time?
WorldCom
Not just the biggest accounting scandal, it’s also the biggest bankruptcies of all time — in the US. Talk about going bankrupt with $4billions in hand? Bernie Ebbers (CEO) is a mastermind with this one.
Usually, all companies report their profit/loss publicly. So, in 2001 these guys reported a profit of $1.4 billion out of a $3 billion revenue. When Mr. Ebbers actually had offloaded billions into personal accounts and for the yearly report they showed that money as Operating expenses. Why? This way money offloaded is looked as an investment and gives investors some confidence and they look forward to investing more. More money!
What about it?
With a (fake) profit of $1.4 billion, they managed to get more investment. Yup, that means more cash to fraudulently pull out. But one day, all these fishy operating expenses were audited and they had to confess to nearly $4 billion in accounting wrongdoings in June 2002. Just one month later, the company filed for bankruptcy — one of the biggest in history. You don’t just go from $4,000,000,000 to $0 magically. The CEO and CFO were caught and sent to prison for 25 years. (Might have come out after paying a fraction of that soon enough, who knows).
Woo, so many numbers. So much money. We should look at something else, something less businessy now. Would you be interested in…
No Man’s Airport
The largest scam of Nigeria. Smart boi named Emmanuel Nwude sold a non-existent airport to a Brazillian bank for $242 Million. A bank brought an airport without checking for details. How?
Nwude was a former director of Union Bank of Nigeria and this position made him privy to some links and information that other people would not be aware of. To add, he pretended to be the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria and approached Sakaguchi — Director of the Brazilian bank.
The conversation went like this:
Nwude: I am the Governor of CBN. I have a secret plan. We make an airport here. You Invest $240M to own it and I get $10M in commission. Win for both!
Sakaguchi: I like it, Governor.
[ Deal! ]
You don’t run with scams this big. Nwude was caught and imprisoned for two and a half years in 2005 after repaying $25M. One year later, he was out and claimed $167 back. Not a bad deal. There’s more story to this but I won’t bore you. Read the rest here if you’d like.
Land too far away
Neil Armstrong was the first man to land on the moon. The second was Buzz Aldrin. Would you want to know when would you land there? Prolly never.
But.
This company by the name Lunar Embassy can sell you one acre of “prime real estate” on the moon — with great Earth views — for just $19.95. Sounds too good to be true? It most likely is.
…even if it isn’t, your ride to your new land won’t ever be very cheap.
I want to transfer my late husband’s $3Million to your bank account
…because you’re a wise man.
I’d like to tell you more about this but the actual story is already there in your email spam folder. Go take a look, maybe there’s more than one.
The end
This was all for today and the chapter on spam and Coincidentally, while I was writing this, a friend Ankit sent me a link about some random scammy easy money making websites that even maybe in one of the local Indian languages but apparently happen to be backed by China. Link here.
Stay safe and keep away, and more importantly, keep your family members who believe in most of the stuff from Whatsapp away too.
This article is a part of the Knowledge•Day blogletter which shares a brief coverage on a new random topic every week. If you are curious minded, check out my other posts here:
