On April 14th, 2021, in the federal prison of Butner, North Carolina, an 82-year-old inmate died. This man was Bernard Madoff, one of the biggest swindlers in history, the mastermind of the most elaborate Ponzi scheme. The businessman was at the head of one of the main investment companies on Wall Street when he was arrested in 2008. His "pyramid" represented a volume of nearly 65 billion dollars...

We often hear the term Ponzi scheme without knowing exactly where it comes from. A Ponzi scheme - named after the man who invented it in 1920s Boston - is a financial arrangement that attracts customers whose investments are used to pay the originators and first members, thus creating a fraudulent cycle. As long as subscriptions increase, the deception is covered up, but as soon as the income from the new victims is not enough to pay back the clients, the system collapses...

This is not a story about a salesman on the sly. In the 1920s, Victor Lustig really wanted to sell THE Eiffel Tower. Born in 1890 in Central Europe to a bourgeois family, the young man was a brilliant schoolboy, spoke several languages, but he gradually turned to crime and scams, especially involving card games. In 1920, he left to conquer the United States where he pretended to be an accountant. Among other things, he managed to swindle Al Capone by selling him a fake money printing machine...