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  • 35 - Frederick Emerson Peters.

    35 - Frederick Emerson Peters.
    2026/06/28
    Frederick Emerson Peters.
    Frederick Emerson Peters (September 28, 1885 – July 25, 1959) was an American impostor who wrote bad checks masquerading as scholars and famous people. In an age before mass communication, few store owners bothered to ID check writers. He was born in West Salem, Ohio.

    Background.
    Peters began his career of passing phony checks around 1902 when he presented himself as Theodore Roosevelt II, the son of the US president. He used fraudulent checks for his purchases, writing them to round numbers just a couple of dollars above the price of the purchase. Many of the fooled businesses were still impressed and even framed the checks as mementos.
    Peters was eventually arrested in 1915 and sentenced to ten years in prison. He took charge of the prison library and used it to study various subjects to further his plans.
    When he was released he took a role of antique expert "R.A. Coleman" of the American Peace Society. He visited antique shops ostensibly to buy items for museum collections and again rounded off checks for his "commission". As "J.J. Morton", he bought books for universities. By 1948 he amassed around 130 aliases.
    Over the following years he impersonated real people like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Booth Tarkington and Gifford Pinchot II. He was also jailed many times, but always returned to his old activities later. Further research would be needed to clarify if he was the same Frederick Emerson Peters who on July 2, 1951, became the 22nd Ten Most Wanted Fugitive listed by the FBI, and who was then arrested by two FBI agents when they recognized him in a Washington, D.C. hotel lobby on January 15, 1952.
    When asked why he kept returning to crime, Peters gave a classic response: "It would require the rock-like will of the Sphynx to resist such temptation." When he was found dead in 1959, he had five checks on his pockets - all of them written for different names. Peters died on July 25, 1959, at a hotel in New Haven, Connecticut of a cerebral hemorrhage.


    Wikipedia: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

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    2 分
  • 34 - Paul Palaiologos Tagaris.

    34 - Paul Palaiologos Tagaris.
    2026/06/28
    Paul Palaiologos Tagaris. Paul Palaiologos Tagaris (c. 1320/1340 – after 1394) was a Byzantine Greek monk and impostor. A scion of the Tagaris family, Paul also claimed a somewhat dubious connection with the Palaiologos dynasty that ruled the Byzantine Empire at the time. He fled his marriage as a teenager and became a monk, but soon his fraudulent practices embroiled him in scandal. Fleeing Constantinople, he traveled widely, from Palestine to Persia and Georgia and eventually, via Ukraine and Hungary to Italy, Latin Greece, Cyprus and France. During his long and tumultuous career, Paul was appointed an Orthodox bishop, sold ordinations to ecclesiastical offices, pretended to be the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, switched from Greek Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism and back again, supported both the See of Rome and the Avignon anti-popes in the Western Schism, and managed to be named Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. In the end, his deceptions unmasked, he returned to Constantinople, where he repented and confessed his sins before a synod in 1394. Early life and family. The main source on Paul's life is the document of his confession before the patriarchal synod in Constantinople, which is undated, but included among documents of the years 1394–1395. It was published in modern times by Franz Ritter von Miklosich and Joseph Muller (eds.), Acta et Diplomata Græca medii ævi sacra et profana, Vol. II, Acta Patriarchatus Constantinopolitanæ, Vienna 1860. The confession is complemented by an account of his visit to Paris in 1390, written by a monk of the Abbey of Saint-Denis and included in the anonymous Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, contenant le règne de Charles VI de 1380 à 1422. Paul Tagaris was apparently a scion of the Tagaris family, a lineage which first appears in the early 14th century. His father is unnamed, but is described by Paul as a valiant and famous soldier, so that he is possibly identifiable either with the megas stratopedarches Manuel Tagaris, or with the latter's son, George Tagaris. Paul Tagaris claimed to be related to the ruling imperial dynasty of the Palaiologoi and adopted the surname for himself. Manuel Tagaris was indeed married to Theodora Asanina Palaiologina, daughter of Ivan Asen III of Bulgaria, and niece of Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, but even if Paul was Manuel's son, Theodora was, according to the Byzantinist Donald Nicol, "almost certainly not the mother of Paul". According to Nicol, Tagaris was probably born in the 1320s, while other modern sources like the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit put it later, around the year 1340. His parents arranged his marriage at the age of 14 or 15, but soon he abandoned his wife and left Constantinople to become a monk in Palestine. After a while he returned to Constantinople, where he quickly became embroiled in scandal: he claimed that an icon in his possession had miraculous properties, and made money out of gullible believers. This affair scandalized his family, but Patriarch Kallistos I declined to take action against him. It was not until the patriarch went on a visit to Serbia in July 1363 that his locum tenens, the hieromonk Dorotheos, confiscated the icon and forced Paul to return to Palestine. Career in the East. In Palestine, Paul was able to secure his ordination as a deacon by the Patriarch of Jerusalem Lazaros, who took him under his protection (c. 1364). Shortly after, Lazaros left for Constantinople, and his locum tenens Damianos brought charges against Paul, who was forced to abandon Jerusalem for Antioch. In Antioch, Paul once again managed to befriend an influential figure, the newly elected (1368) Patriarch Michael, who not only ordained him a priest, but eventually made him patriarchal exarch and administrator of the Patriarchate's affairs. It was not long before Paul began abusing his authority: he sacked serving bishops and put their sees up for sale, threatening to report those who complained to the Turkish authorities. Soon he claimed the title of Patriarch of Jerusalem for himself and began to ordain bishops, even in territories subject to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. In 1370, he went to Iconium and then to Persia and Georgia, where, according to his own recollection, he adjudicated a dispute among three rival claimants of the throne, finding in favour of the highest bidder. No such dispute is recorded in Georgian sources at this time. At this point, again according to his own account, he felt remorse and considered returning to Constantinople, where he would give the fortune he had amassed to the poor, but he was forestalled by the Bishop of Tyre and Sidon, who found him and delivered an offer by the Patriarch of Antioch to name him bishop of Taurezion (an unidentified location, suggested as being either in the Taurus Mountains or in the Tauric peninsula, i.e. the Crimea). Paul accepted, and was ...
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    15 分
  • 33 - Arthur Orton.

    33 - Arthur Orton.
    2026/06/28
    Arthur Orton. Arthur Orton (20 March 1834 – 1 April 1898) was an English man who has generally been identified by legal historians and commentators as the "Tichborne Claimant", who in two celebrated court cases both fascinated and shocked Victorian society in the 1860s and 1870s. The son of a London butcher, Orton went to sea as a boy, spent a year in Chile, and worked as a butcher and stockman for squatters in Australia in the middle-to-late 1850s. In 1866 Thomas Castro, a butcher from Wagga Wagga in Australia, claimed to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne estates and baronetcy who had been declared lost at sea in 1854. During the protracted court proceedings that followed Castro's claim, evidence was produced that Castro might in fact be Arthur Orton, attempting to secure the Tichborne fortunes by imposture. The verdict of the jury in Regina versus Castro (1873–74) was that Castro was not Roger Tichborne, and that he was Arthur Orton. He was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for perjury. After his release he lived in great poverty, still insisting that he was Tichborne. In 1895 he confessed to being Orton, but about one year later he retracted his confession. He died in 1898; the Tichborne family allowed a coffin plate bearing the names "Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne" to be placed on the coffin, not because his claim had been conceded, but because "[n]o legal means of preventing such an outrage existed". Commentators have generally concurred with the court's verdict that the Claimant was Orton, but some 20th-century analysts have raised uncertainties about this accepted view, and have suggested that, although the Orton identity remains the most likely, a lingering doubt persists. Biography. Orton was born at Wapping, London, the son of George Orton, a butcher and purveyor of ships' stores. In November 1852 he sailed for Tasmania aboard the Middleton and arrived at Hobart in May 1853. There, Orton worked for several butchers. There is some evidence he was a heavy drinker; and for minor trade malpractices, he appeared before magistrates. The Hobart Mercury of 1 Aug 1855 reports on the case of 'Fane v. Orton' in the Mayor's Court in which the City Surveyor brought a charge of 'offering for sale...unwholesome meat, unfit for human food' against 'Arthur Orton, butcher, Macquarie-street' to which Orton pleaded guilty. In October 1855, Orton appeared on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences brought by Frederick Dight, after Orton had been a witness against Dight in an earlier Supreme Court trial, but the case was dismissed. From 1855 to the mid-1860s there is little detail about his life, but he appears to have pursued gold prospecting, mail-running and pastoral station-hand work, with a suggestion of bushranging and even murder. Orton left Hobart as a passenger on schooner Eclipse on 16 November 1855 bound for Port Albert on the coast of Gippsland, Victoria. He worked for some time on squatters 'runs' in the district. While employed at one he was said to have written 'on a fly-leaf of one of the station novels' and this was later offered as evidence that Orton did not have the education that would have been expected of Tichborne: "This day i have received a letter from Donald MacDonald. With the Seal Broken. i Arthur Orton here make a vow on this Book. Although not a Bible. It bear a cross, That i am a man of Bone Blood and flesh. That i will find out the Man if Possible. That broke the said Seal. And that i will punish him according to the laws of, My Countrie. Sined Arthur Orton. Dargo. 11 March 1858". In May 1856, he appears in a subscription list, donating £2, for 'the Patriotic Fund from the Upper District of Gippsland' as a stockman and 'one of the men' of 'Mewburn Park'. In April 1859, a letter to the editor of the 'Gippsland Guardian' mentions Orton, 'who was in charge of the Dargo station', and recounts Orton's testimony in relation to 'the mysterious disappearance of William Henry Clare alias Ballaarat Harry, and Thomas Took'. Orton's letters to England while he was in Hobart showed he was fond of dogs and children and affectionate towards his girlfriend in Wapping. However a personal notice in a Hobart newspaper from May 1856 – 'If this should meet the eye of Arthur Orton, formerly of 69, Wapping, London, by applying on board the "Irene", he will hear of his friends.' – after he had departed for Victoria raises the question of when the correspondence may have ended. Tichborne claimant. In August 1865 advertisements appeared in Australian newspapers asking for information about the fate of Roger Charles Tichborne (born 1829), who had been on a vessel, Bella, which had disappeared at sea off the coast of South America in 1854. This advertisement had been inserted by Lady Tichborne, the missing man's mother, who believed her son was still alive. Roger Tichborne had, however, been presumed dead by the courts and his younger...
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    11 分
  • 32 - Richard Allen Minsky.

    32 - Richard Allen Minsky.
    2026/06/28
    Richard Allen Minsky. Richard Allen Minsky (born March 15, 1944), also known as Richard Alan Minsky, is an American former used car salesman who was convicted of multiple charges of rape, assault, battery, extortion, grand theft, larceny, lewd and lascivious behavior, oral copulation, sexual assault, sexual battery, sodomy, and escape. He was charged over 80 times and convicted in more than a dozen trials over a series of scams committed in the states of California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. A registered sex offender, Minsky was featured on the television shows America's Most Wanted and Fox Files several times in 1999 and arrested in Tampa, Florida on September 15 of that year. After extradition to California, Minsky was sentenced to 146 years to life in prison by the Superior Court of Los Angeles County on November 30, 2001. Background. Richard Allen Minsky was born in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1944. He was a used car salesman who lived in the nearby towns of Brookline and Winthrop. According to police, his hobbies included smoking, gambling and betting on horse races. Sex scam. Los Angeles Police Department detective John Metcalf first investigated Minsky in 1982 for the same M.O. involving 4 victims. Metcalf again ran across Minsky in 1998, after his release from a 2-year sentence in Massachusetts. According to Metcalf's testimony, Minsky preyed on women randomly selected from a phone book. He was able to imitate voices of various people to aid in the deception. Minsky would start cold calls by whispering at a barely audible level until the victim called out a name, giving him the information needed to continue the ruse. He would then pose as an attorney to convince them that the aforementioned loved one was in legal trouble. In variations of the scam, he would say that the loved one was involved in a hit and run accident that carried a mandatory two-year sentence. He would tell the victim that a witness would have to be bribed with sex or money in order to drop charges so that their loved one would be released from jail. Minsky met with the women as the so-called witness at various locations such as hotels, and sexually assaulted some of them. In some of the cases, he urged the victim to dress provocatively for the meeting. In the 1982 cases Minsky was difficult to prosecute because there was no weapon or threat of bodily injury. Arrests and incarceration. Metcalf eventually counted hundreds of victims across California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington. Because of Minsky's arrests in 1983, in Georgia and conviction of sodomy, sexual assault, and extortion in Georgia and Florida, Metcalf's arrest warrant was recalled in the interest of justice. In January 1985, Minsky pleaded no contest in a trial for the September 1982 rape of a Fort Lauderdale woman. In exchange for the plea bargain, Assistant Florida State Attorney John Jolly dropped related charges of extortion and grand theft. Broward County Circuit Judge Patti Henning sentenced Minsky to fifteen years in prison for the rape, of which he served about 11 years including time served. In 1994, Minsky posed as a lawyer named Dennis to lure a woman from the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts to Plum Island with information supposedly exposing an extramarital affair her husband was having. After he brought the victim to the island, he beat her with a plank and raped her. Minsky was interviewed by Detective Metcalf, during Minsky's extradition to California on their charges, regarding his involvement in the Plum Island rape. Minsky denied any involvement and local authorities declined to prosecute based partially on the victim's previous false police reports, according to local authorities. On December 7, 1996, Minsky was arrested in Boston, Massachusetts and charged with three counts each of attempted extortion and assault, and one count of failing to register as a sex offender. Minsky was wrapped in a windbreaker to hide his identity during a court hearing where his bail was set at $13,000. Boston Police detective William Hartford stated that Minsky spent over 90 minutes at a payphone with a bag of dimes at the Copley Plaza Hotel, randomly calling women from the Boston and Cambridge phone books. Minsky told the women that he was holding their friends or family hostage and demanded sex as ransom. One of the women called contacted the police from her car phone. He was convicted of indecent assault and battery. He was released from a Massachusetts Correctional Institution in June 1998, but again failed to register as a sex offender and skipped probation. Within two weeks, Minsky struck again in Los Angeles and was sought for parole violations in connection with crimes against eleven women in Southern California and stealing approximately $50,000. Metcalf sought help in finding Minsky by profiling him on Fox Files in April and June 1999. According to ...
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    9 分
  • 31 - Mandla Lamba.

    31 - Mandla Lamba.
    2026/06/28
    Mandla Lamba. Mandla Lamba is a South African scammer, known for having acquired a fake reputation as the country's "youngest billionaire" and a successful mining tycoon before being exposed. He was arrested on fraud and homicide charges in May 2011 and was imprisoned before becoming active again in 2021 following his release from jail. Rise to notoriety. In 2010, South African media hailed Lamba as an inspirational example of young entrepreneurship and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), based on his claims of having risen from underprivileged beginnings to become, at age 25, a wealthy businessman who owned gold, diamond and manganese mines in South Africa, Zambia and the Republic of the Congo. He was the executive chairman of East American Resources, a "mid-tier mining company" that he claimed was worth "billions". Lamba cultivated a public image of a successful businessman, living a lavish lifestyle and flaunting his supposed wealth by driving expensive sports cars, hiring three bodyguards and spending extravagant amounts of money at nightlife establishments. Lamda's reputation began to be called into question after Investec Bank refuted claims by Lamba that he had been offered a directorship at the bank but had to decline because he was "too busy". This raised suspicions, and investigative journalists began looking into his background only to find that his life story, academic qualifications, and business dealings all lacked credibility. He was found to have operated an insurance and financial services company without a proper registration with the Financial Services Board; it sold final expenses insurance and offered debt consolidation services, but customers did not receive the services they paid for, and its employees were also owed wages. It was also discovered that Lamba was listed in a fraud database and had previously twice defaulted on debt. It was found that Lamba was wanted by police for culpable homicide in relation to a 2007 traffic accident in Roodepoort that led to two deaths, having absconded from the criminal proceedings. He was also wanted on multiple charges of fraud – six in Gauteng, five in KwaZulu-Natal and one in Free State. In one instance, Lamba was alleged to have cheated multiple taxi drivers of R40,000 each by promising that he would help purchase new vehicles for them at lower prices; charges had been filed, but he fled "when the case was in its final stages". Following the publication of the exposé in City Press on 7 November 2010, business partners of Lamba also came forward to accuse him of defrauding them, or lying about the nature of their dealings, such as misrepresenting preliminary negotiations as deals that had been completed, or were close to finalization. Lamba resigned from the chairmanship of East American Resources, but denied that this was connected to the allegations against him and the resulting negative publicity. Lamba then gave an interview on 12 November 2010 with radio station SAfm in which he lambasted several journalists for "misquot[ing]" and "writ[ing] lies" about him, vehemently attacking and threatening the author of the exposé in particular. Lamba repeated prior allegations that there was a conspiracy by "former allies", "rivals and enemies" to "harass" and discredit him. In an unusual move, prominent businessman, politician and future President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa personally called the radio station to issue a public denial that neither he nor his wife, physician and businesswoman Tshepo Motsepe, had any connection with Lamba, refuting Lamba's previous claims that they had been his "mentors, counsellors and parental guiders". 2011 arrest. After several months of successfully evading the police, for which he was dubbed "BEE Houdini" by the press, Lamba was arrested in Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton, Johannesburg on 10 May 2011 on 15 charges of fraud and one of culpable homicide after police were tipped off about his location. It was reported that he had supported his fancy lifestyle with a "small fortune" made from "several fraudulent deals and online scams"; he also reportedly failed to pay the security company that provided his bodyguards. Lamba had actually been caught by police several months earlier, when he was arrested together with three friends and his three bodyguards at Cresta Shopping Centre in Johannesburg, in October 2010, in relation to a chain of jewellery store robberies. They were released when this was found to be in error; police did not realize that Lamba was a wanted person as they had not taken his fingerprints. Lamba retained the services of high-profile lawyer Zola Majavu in relation to this case; Majavu secured the release of Lamba and his associates and the return of their confiscated mobile phones, also filing a R14 million lawsuit against the police for false arrest. Majavu quit his representation of Lamba upon the latter's arrest, citing R120,000 in unpaid fees. Criminal ...
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    11 分
  • 30 - Sante Kimes.

    30 - Sante Kimes.
    2026/06/27
    Sante Kimes. Sante Kimes (née Singhrs; July 24, 1934 – May 19, 2014), also known as the Dragon Lady, was an American murderer, con artist, robber, fraudster, serial arsonist and suspected serial killer. Her decades-long crime spree – including throughout her marriage to her second husband, millionaire Kenneth Kimes Sr. – was briefly paused starting in 1985 when she served three years in prison on a conviction of slavery, and eventually ended with her arrest for the 1998 murder of Irene Silverman in New York City. Many of these crimes were committed with the assistance of her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr. In 2000, both were tried and convicted together on 118 charges, including the murder of Silverman. In 2004, Kenneth Jr. made a plea deal in the 1998 murder of David Kazdin in Los Angeles, agreeing to testify against his mother in exchange for neither facing the death penalty. Sante was subsequently convicted of the Kazdin murder. The pair were also suspected of but never charged in a third murder in the Bahamas, to which Kenneth Jr. later confessed. Sante also admitted to her son that she murdered the partner in one of her arsons, Elmer Ambrose Holmgren, who had disappeared in Costa Rica; no charges were brought in this crime. Early life and criminal history. Sante Kimes was born Sante Louise Singhrs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on July 24, 1934, the third of four children born to Illinois native of Dutch ancestry Mary Gertrude (née Van Horn; 1897–1969) and herbalist Prama Mahendra "Doc" Singhrs (1889–1940). Sante's father had emigrated from the Indian region of Punjab by way of Canada. She had three siblings: an older brother and sister, and one younger sister. As a teenager, Sante would go by the name "Sandra." Sante would later falsely claim that her father left the family when she was three years old and that her mother became a prostitute. In reality, Sante's father died from heart disease when she was five years old. According to her younger sister, Retha, Sante had an incestuous relationship with their brother, Carl (Karam), and was a pyromaniac who held lit matches underneath Retha's fingers against her will. As a child, Sante would tie up the goats and dogs on her family's farm and use hatpins to mutilate and torture them. When she was a teenager, Sante moved with her mother and younger sister to Los Angeles. There she was allegedly adopted by Edwin and Mary Chambers, along with another boy. She moved with her new family to Carson City, Nevada, where she graduated from Carson High School in 1952. At school, Sante earned a reputation as a bully who frequently belittled and intimidated younger students. In 1956, Sante reunited with a former boyfriend from high school, Edward Walker. They married the following year and had one son, Kent Walker. After a 1961 shoplifting conviction in Sacramento, Sante separated and reconciled intermittently with Walker, but their divorce was not finalized until 1969. Walker was a general contractor who built houses in the Sacramento area; in December 1960, Sante set fire to a house he had built in order to fraudulently collect insurance. She only destroyed the kitchen and received US$10,000 (equivalent to $109,000 in 2025). Over the course of their marriage, dozens of houses that Walker had supervised burned down, and Sante had a number of affairs with his wealthy business associates. After her first divorce, Sante and Kent travelled to Palm Springs, California. In 1971, Sante met Kenneth Keith Kimes Sr., a motel tycoon seventeen years her senior, after reading about his divorce in a magazine article and learning that he had a net worth of approximately $20 million (equivalent to $118 million in 2025). The couple would eventually marry in Clark County, Nevada, on April 5, 1981. They had one son, Kenneth Kimes Jr., who was born on March 24, 1975. Sante spent the better part of her life fleecing people of money, expensive merchandise and real estate, either through arson, elaborate con games, forgery or outright theft. She committed insurance fraud on numerous occasions, frequently by committing arson and then collecting money for property damage. She also frequently introduced Kenneth Sr. as an ambassador, a ploy that even gained the couple access to a White House reception during the Ford Administration. She sometimes impersonated Elizabeth Taylor, whom she resembled slightly. Sante committed many acts of fraud that were not even financially necessary, such as enslaving maids when she could easily afford to pay them. She frequently offered young, homeless undocumented immigrants housing and employment, then kept them as virtual prisoners by threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they did not follow her orders. As a result, Sante and Kenneth Sr. spent years squandering his fortune on lawyers' fees, defending themselves against charges of slavery. Sante was eventually arrested in August 1985 and was sentenced by the ...
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    19 分
  • 29 - Brian Kim (hedge fund manager).

    29 - Brian Kim (hedge fund manager).
    2026/06/27
    Brian Kim (hedge fund manager).
    Brian Kim (also known as "Bu Yung Kim"; born 1975/1976) is an American former hedge fund manager. He founded the now-defunct Liquid Capital Management LLC, which focused on futures trading.
    In 2011, he was found guilty of fraudulent solicitation, misappropriation, and misrepresentation to investors and regulatory organizations. An injunction was sought, preventing him from trading in commodities futures and foreign currencies. A $12.5 million default judgement was entered against him, and he was banned from commodity trading.
    In 2012, he pleaded guilty to charges including passport fraud, grand larceny, scheme to defraud, violation of the NY General Business Law (Martin Act), and falsifying business records to further a Ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to a term of five years, seven months and 15 years, seven months in prison.

    Early life and education.
    Kim was born in the late-to-mid 1970s in New Jersey. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1997, where he had majored in economics and minored in art history.

    Career.
    He founded the now-defunct Liquid Capital Management LLC, which focused on futures trading, in 2002 and had an office on Broadway in New York City.
    In 2009, Kim twice appeared on CNBC's financial television news show Squawk Box, speaking as an expert about derivatives trading.

    Controversy.
    Brian Kim owned and lived in an apartment at Christodora House. He was indicted and arrested in 2009, and accused of stealing $435,000 from the Christodora House condo association in 2008.
    Kim failed to appear at his trial in January 2011, and was charged with jumping bail. He had fled to Hong Kong after obtaining a new passport by saying his was lost. In fact it had been confiscated by authorities. He was taken into custody in Hong Kong in October 2011, and was returned to the United States.
    After an investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) into his hedge fund business, in February 2011, Kim was charged both civilly and criminally with financial fraud, grand larceny, and scheme to defraud for running a $6 million Ponzi scheme from January 2003 through January 2011, and cheating at least 45 investors from the West Coast while providing them with fake monthly performance statements. According to prosecutors, he misrepresented the quality of the investments to his clients, while stealing some of the money for himself.
    The CFTC sued Kim and Liquid Capital in February 2011, charging them with fraudulent solicitation, misappropriation, and misrepresentation to investors and regulatory organizations, and seeking an injunction preventing them from trading in commodities futures and foreign currencies. The agency said Kim and his employees told clients that Liquid Capital generated returns of more than 240 percent, when in fact they were losing money, and the only funds coming in were from new deposits by clients.
    In April 2011, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found the defendants guilty of all charges. She entered a default judgment of $12.5 million against him, and he and Liquid Capital were banned from further commodity trading. In addition, the court froze his assets.
    In March 2012, he pleaded guilty to passport fraud by attempting to acquire a new passport from by claiming his was lost. In reality, his passport was already confiscated by prosecutors.
    On March 16, 2012, Kim pleaded guilty to nine of the 26 counts against him, including grand larceny, scheme to defraud, violation of the NY General Business Law (Martin Act), and falsifying business records in connection with the Ponzi scheme charge, and stealing $435,000 from the Christadora House.
    In April 2012, Kim was sentenced by Justice Charles H. Solomon in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan to five to 15 years in state prison, which was to commence after Kim had served seven months in federal prison on his passport fraud conviction.


    Wikipedia: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
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    5 分
  • 28 - Belle Gibson.

    28 - Belle Gibson.
    2026/06/27
    Belle Gibson. Annabelle Natalie Gibson (born 8 October 1991) is an Australian health fraudster, former influencer and pseudoscience advocate. She is the author of The Whole Pantry mobile app and its later companion cookbook. Throughout her career as a wellness guru, Gibson falsely claimed to have been diagnosed with multiple cancer pathologies, including brain cancer, which she claimed to be effectively managing through diet, exercise, natural medicine, and alternative medicine therapies. She falsely claimed she had donated significant proportions of her income and company profits to numerous charities. Gibson admitted in an April 2015 interview that she had fabricated her claims of having multiple cancers. Consumer Affairs Victoria announced legal action against Gibson in 2016, and in 2017 the Federal Court of Australia supported most of their claims, applying a fine of A$410,000, which, as of March 2025, Gibson has not paid. Early life and education. Annabelle Natalie Gibson was born on 8 October 1991 in Launceston, Tasmania. According to interviews given before she was exposed, she left her Brisbane family home at age 12 to live with a classmate and later lived with a family friend. Gibson attended Wynnum State High School in Wynnum, Queensland, until dropping out in Year 10, although she also later claimed to have been homeschooled. Career and deceit. Gibson worked for some time as a trainee for catering supply company PFD Food Services in Lytton. Social media posts show that by late 2008 she had relocated to Perth, Western Australia. She was involved in the skateboarding culture and actively participated in its online community there. Gibson moved from Perth to Melbourne in July 2009 and became a mother one year later, at age 18. In 2012, Gibson launched her Instagram account, "@healing_belle", claiming she had brain cancer and promoting nutrition and lifestyle interventions. The account amassed "200,000 followers within a year". She launched The Whole Pantry mobile app in August 2013, at age 21 (just 2 months shy of her 22nd birthday). Gibson reportedly told a prospective business partner in 2014 that she had "several names" that she went under. Her mother changed her name five times when she was young, Gibson claimed in an interview with The Australian Women's Weekly. Gibson's corporate filings indicate that she is three years younger than she has publicly claimed to be. The Whole Pantry. Gibson's mobile app The Whole Pantry was downloaded 200,000 times within its first month. It was voted Apple's Best Food and Drink App of 2013. Gibson soon after signed a book deal with Lantern Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, for an accompanying table-top cookbook, which was published in October 2014. She further worked with Apple Inc. in September 2014 to transition the app as a privileged pre-installed default third-party inclusion in the Apple Watch's April 2015 launch. By early 2015, it was estimated that more than A$1 million had been made in sales of The Whole Pantry app and book. Gibson chronicled her experience of cancer on a blog of the same name, but "doubts about her claims surfaced after she failed to deliver a promised $300,000 donation to a charity". Before doubts were raised about her health and charitable donation claims, Gibson had intended to expand her brand beyond the app, having earlier registered the domain The Whole Life, and advertised in December 2014 to recruit an IT specialist to expand the app and brand portfolio. Both The Whole Pantry app and The Whole Life were registered by Gibson's partner, Clive Rothwell, in her corporate name. The Whole Pantry registration was amended in March 2015 after the controversy broke. The Whole Pantry denied that Gibson had helped any person to reject conventional cancer treatment. Critics have quoted social media posts in which she said she had "countless times helped others" to forgo conventional medical treatment for cancer and to treat themselves "naturally", as well as "leading them down natural therapy for everything from fertility, depression, bone damage and other types of cancer". Health claims. In interviews, Gibson claimed to have had brain cancer, blood, spleen, uterine, liver and kidney cancers, which she falsely attributed to a reaction to the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine. When the book was launched in November 2014, Gibson claimed in its preface that she had been "stable for two years now with no growth of the cancer". Her story emerged as inconsistent: she told media outlets the cancer had reached her liver and kidneys; three months earlier, she had posted on The Whole Pantry's Facebook page that her cancer had spread to her brain, blood, spleen, and uterus. Gibson had claimed she had undergone heart surgery several times and to have died momentarily on the operating table. She also claimed to have had a stroke. However, she could not substantiate her medical claims, or name the doctors who ...
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