Desiring to become a physician, but unable to afford medical school, John Brinkley, born in 1885 to a modest North Carolina family, decided to buy a degree outright. With no skills whatsoever, he was now allowed to practice in Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Obviously, this could only spell disaster...

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Zhen Wang Huang is an Indonesian who is considered one of the leading experts in oenology in the early 2000s. Born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, he immigrated to the United States in 1998 and studied in California. He quickly took the name Rudy Kurniawan, and presented himself as a rich Indonesian heir. He started a career as a wine collector, specializing in French wines and became a key figure in the industry at the age of 30...

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Portrayed by actress Romy Schneider in the film La Banquière, Marthe Hanau has gradually fallen into oblivion. Which is a shame : her story deserves to be remembered ! Born in 1886 in Paris, she became one of the rare businesswomen working in finance at the turn of the 20th century. It must be said that ever since her adolescence, Marthe was determined to lead the life she wanted, despite her parents' authority...

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Born in Stockholm in 1817 into a modest family, Aurora Florentina Magnusson had an early desire to rise above her social standing. In the 1830s, she worked as a domestic servant. In 1838, while working for a wealthy family, she befriended the daughter of the house. The young woman became her companion and accomplice. Indeed, in the 1840s the two young women lived together and traveled between Sweden and Finland. During this period, Aurora changed her identity, becoming Helga de la Brache. In 1860, the friends returned to Stockholm and launched the swindle that would establish Helga's legend.

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Little known to the general public, this Kazakh businessman has nevertheless committed dantesque frauds. First a politician in Kazakhstan, Mukhtar Ablyazov was convicted in 1999 for abuse of power, embezzlement, tax evasion and fraud during his term as Minister of Energy. In 2002, as chairman of the supervisory board of a public company, he was charged with abuse of power by the financial police.

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This forger had the audacity to make counterfeits of artists who were his own contemporaries ! Born in France in 1935 under the name Henri Abel Abraham Haddad, he used many pseudonyms of which David Stein is the most famous. He began his forgeries in Paris, and even went so far as to meet Picasso in the south of France to have a drawing he wanted to sell authenticated, deceiving the great artist himself ! Aware of his stroke of genius, but also of the difficulty of ripping off art dealers in Paris, he decided to leave for the United States. It is there that David really become an exceptional forger, selling false paintings of masters at low prices.

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He may not be one of the most successful swindlers, but Christophe Rocancourt has become a media personality. He had a difficult childhood, with a complicated family situation and was abandoned in an orphanage at only nine years old. It was there he made his first thefts. As a teenager, he moved to Paris, where he had no money but met people who made him discover the world of night life. From then on, he got along thanks to his natural charisma and his talent for lying.

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Recently brought back to light with a documentary series on Netflix, the value added tax fraud on carbon quotas, is a huge scam that was in the news in the first decade of the 2000s in France. Some even consider this case the scam of the young century. The idea was born in 2005, when EU policies on environmental conservation put in place a tax on carbon emissions from large companies. Through a cap and trade system, all european companies have a sort of pollution quota beyond which they must pay if they want to continue to emit. To do so, the company would buy a share of the quota not exploited by another company. But the swindlers detect a flaw in the system: the value added tax...

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