Biographies About
Con Artists & Scammers

From charismatic grifters to financial fraudsters and predatory pretenders,
these are some of the wildest cons in true crime history.

The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up....

"An engrossing microcosm of the internet’s Wild West years" (Kirkus Reviews), award-winning journalist David Kushner tells the incredible battle between the founder of Match.com and the con man who swindled him out of the website Sex.com, resulting in an all-out war....

Inside the biggest scandal in the history of America’s $40 billion drug recovery industry: a predatory Malibu rehab guru - and the fearless female patient who exposed his empire of deceit....

This is the story of an unforgivable con man. Vulnerable families were his prey. His promise was an impossible dream and a lie....

There was no pattern to the murders, no common thread other than the fact that the victims were all vacationers, robbed of their possessions, and slain in seemingly random crimes. Authorities across three continents and a dozen nations had no idea they were all looking for the same man....

Steven A. Cohen changed Wall Street. He and his fellow pioneers of the hedge fund industry didn’t lay railroads, build factories, or invent new technologies. Rather, they made their billions through financial speculation....

Abby Ellin was shocked to learn that her fiancé was leading a secret life. But as she soon discovered, the world is full of people who aren't what they seem....

An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer....

This is the enormously entertaining story of how a fraudulent surgeon made a fortune by inserting goats' testes into impotent American men....

Empire of Deception is not only an incredibly rich and detailed account of a man and an era; it's a fascinating look at the methods of swindlers throughout history....

It was a time when anything seemed possible, instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury, and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true....

Here is a tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century's most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries....

The Dinosaur Artist is a stunning work of narrative journalism about humans' relationship with natural history and a seemingly intractable conflict between science and commerce....

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover....

Ferdinand Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his generation - a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street, who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme....

A darkly comic inquiry into how to fake your own death, the disappearance industry, and the lengths to which people will go to be reborn....

He was one of the brightest stars at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce...

A journey into the hobo underworld, freight hopping around the still Wild West, becoming a highwayman and member of the yegg (criminal) brotherhood....