Word: scam
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...nation's largest accounting firms to the list of watchdogs and regulators that didn't catch the multibillion-dollar Madoff investment scam...
Though a Boston businessman named Charles Ponzi was the scam's namesake, he wasn't its original practitioner. According to Mitchell Zuckoff, a Ponzi biographer, the reigning king of the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam was a New York grifter named William Miller, who bilked investors out of $1 million - nearly $25 million in today's dollars - in 1899. After drumming up interest by claiming to have an inside window into the way profitable companies operated, Miller - who earned the nickname "520 percent" due to the astonishing rate of return he promised investors over the course of a year...
...Consider that the multi-billion-dollar scale of Enron executives’ criminal conduct and its destructive effect on innocent people dwarfs the ant scam; however, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling received just 24 years in prison, and two of his associates (and accomplices) could win parole after just five years behind bars...
...will be a shoo-in for a Cabinet post. After all, a criminal record (preferably something fraudulent or involving corruption, the national pastime) is common in the top echelons. Recently, the very MPs implicated in defrauding the people of South Africa through an elaborate travel-voucher scam we call Travelgate (about 40 of them) voted to eliminate the country's most successful crime-fighting unit, the Scorpions. It was bizarrely ironic, even by our delinquent standards, because the Scorpions were the top cops who had brought charges against the Naughty 40 in the first place. Now we will never know...
...accused of swinging the 1960 election for John F. Kennedy with the help of some Chicago voters who had already drawn their last breath, Richard M. Daley has been dogged by problems of his own. At least one of his aides has been convicted in a contract-scam case, and the city council is rarely scandal-free...