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March 6, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #4: The Fix Is In: Planted Documents

Here’s the fourth installment of LiteratEye, a new series, only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #4: The Fix Is In: Planted Documents
By W.J. Elvin III
March 6, 2009

Monk Transcribing Scriptures The recent fuss about President Obama”s birth certificate started me thinking about the broader topic of “planted” documents. Three modern cases, involving murder, fraud and theft came to mind.

The first case features a brilliant fellow, for a time a highly respected document dealer, who concluded his career as an expert forger by committing two murders.

It is the dream of every “picker” to be rummaging through the bargain bin of a second hand bookstore only to discover a real rarity. That actually happened for Mark Hofmann. The twist was that Hofmann had planted this particular document in the bin in the first place. Continue reading “LiteratEye #4: The Fix Is In: Planted Documents”

January 9, 2009January 15, 2019

ADHD Investing

Top 2009 Resolution: Don’t Be Stupid
by Daniel Henninger
Wall Street Journal
January 8, 2008

Bernard Madoff revealed our thoughtless ways.

adhd-investing Back in olden times, mankind found it useful to live by mottoes. A motto reduces the helpful lessons of life to three or four words, maybe two, as in the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. Or, apropos now: Look before you leap.

The most famous motto in our time has been Google’s Don’t Be Evil. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but here’s a motto for the next four or five years: Don’t Be Stupid.

It would not have occurred to me to posit Don’t Be Stupid as a motto for our times had not 2008 ended with the Bernard Madoff story. Up to then, we were all preoccupied with the economic meltdown that began in mid-September with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other household gods of global finance.

The economic crisis, originating in the subprime mortgage lending phenomenon, was said to be complex. Madoff’s story, however, was simple. For years, uncounted numbers of the most sophisticated people here and in Europe conveyed to Mr. Madoff tens of billions of dollars because this solitary investor, unlike virtually every other professional investor, achieved returns in excess of 10% annually in all economic seasons. Continue reading “ADHD Investing”

January 4, 2009January 15, 2019

The Gullibility Factor

Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams
by Stephen Greenspan
The Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2009

Intelligent people have long been ruined by frauds. Psychologist Stephen Greenspan, who specializes in gullibility, explores why investors continue to be swindled — and how he came to lose part of his savings to Bernard Madoff.

anatomyofgullibility

There are few areas where skepticism is more important than how one invests one’s life savings. Yet intelligent and educated people, some of them naà¯ve about finance and others quite knowledgeable, have been ruined by schemes that turned out to be highly dubious and quite often fraudulent. The most dramatic example of this in American history is the recent announcement that Bernard Madoff, a highly regarded money manager and a former chairman of Nasdaq, has for years been running a very sophisticated Ponzi scheme, which by his own admission has defrauded wealthy investors, charities and other funds of at least $50 billion. Continue reading “The Gullibility Factor”