Some of the most damaging scams in history didn’t come from shadowy corners of the internet; they came from trusted brands and high-profile executives.
When you add up just a handful of the biggest cases, they’ve wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in value and affected millions of people.
While the way scams are “packaged” has changed, criminals lean on the same core tactics. And despite new regulations and attempts to enforce scams, reported fraud losses and complaints have only climbed in recent years.
You might be surprised to learn about just how massive some of these fraud organizations were. Let’s dive into 12 of the biggest and most costly scams in history.
12 Biggest Scams in History
1. The Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme (2008)
- Estimated Losses: $65 billion in account balances. $17 to $20 billion in real money was lost.
- Number of People Affected: More than 40,000 victims
- Type of Scam: Ponzi scheme
- Tactics Used: Falsified account statements, used new deposits to pay earlier investors, and relied on trusted “feeder funds.”
On the outside, Bernie Madoff’s scam operation looked like a traditional investment firm, but behind the scenes, it was the largest Ponzi scheme of all time.
Instead of investing client money in the market, Madoff used money from new and existing clients to pay “profits” to earlier ones. Account statements showed stable, positive returns even when the broader market was volatile, which helped attract more “investment”.
The scheme unraveled during the 2008 financial crisis, when many clients tried to withdraw funds at the same time, and Madoff couldn’t keep up.
Madoff’s statements showed roughly $65 billion, but authorities later found these to be largely made up.
The real money that had flowed in and disappeared was closer to $20 billion.
In the last few decades, court-appointed trustees and the Department of Justice have recovered around $19 billion USD (roughly 94% of the losses).
2. Enron Accounting Scandal (2001)
- Estimated Losses: About $74 billion in shareholder value was wiped out
- Number of People Affected: More than 20,000 employees and 59,000 investors.
- Type of Scam: Accounting and securities fraud
- Tactics Used: Hid debt in off-balance-sheet entities, booked future profits as current income, and used misleading financial statements.
Before it failed, Enron was celebrated as a “new economy” energy giant. The company claimed it had reinvented the way electricity, gas, and even bandwidth were traded. The major publicly traded company ranked as high as #7 on the Fortune 500 in 2000, making this scam one of the biggest examples of corporate fraud in history.
Enron’s profits depended heavily on creative accounting. They manipulated mark-to-market rules to count projected future earnings as if they were already in the bank. This allowed the company to inflate its value and make high-risk deals look like low-risk income.
To keep the illusion going, executives moved billions in debt into complex partnerships and special-purpose entities, which kept losses off Enron’s main balance sheet and helped the company keep an investment-grade credit rating.
When analysts and reporters finally pressed for more precise numbers in 2001, Enron was forced to restate earnings, and confidence in the energy giant quickly evaporated.
The stock went from more than $90 a share to under $1 in just over a year, and Enron filed for bankruptcy in December 2001.
Employee retirement accounts tied up in Enron stock were wiped out, and investors absorbed tens of billions in losses. The scandal led directly to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which tightened U.S. rules on corporate reporting, internal controls, and audit independence.
3. Wirecard Accounting Fraud (2020)
- Estimated Losses: More than €20 billion in estimated investment and loan losses.
- Number of People Affected: 50,000+ shareholders
- Type of Scam: Accounting fraud
- Tactics Used: Invented cash balances, inflated revenue, and misleading financial reporting
Wirecard was marketed as one of Europe’s leading fintechs and even joined Germany’s blue-chip DAX index. In reality, a big part of its profits came from businesses that never existed.
Executives claimed that €1.9 billion in customer funds was safely held in trustee accounts at banks in the Philippines. But when auditors checked, the banks said the documents were forged, and the money almost certainly didn’t exist.
CEO Markus Braun was arrested, COO Jan Marsalek disappeared (and is still on Europe’s Most Wanted List), and the company filed for insolvency in June 2020.
The real damage came after the company’s collapse. Creditors filed claims for about €15.4 billion, but administrators were only able to recover €650 million in assets. That means only a small share of the losses will ever be repaid, and most shareholders are unlikely to see anything back.
The scandal also pushed Germany to give its regulator BaFin stronger powers and triggered wider EU reviews of how auditors and listed companies are supervised.
4. Allen Stanford Ponzi Scheme (2009)
- Estimated Losses: Around $7 to $8 billion in fraudulent certificates of deposit
- Number of People Affected: 18,000 to 25,000 investors
- Type of Scam: Ponzi scheme
- Tactics Used: Misrepresented how funds were invested and used new deposits to pay earlier investors
Allen Stanford sold his scheme through Stanford International Bank in Antigua. He pitched his CDs as a low-risk way to earn reliably higher returns than U.S. banks. He claimed that the money was spread across a conservative, diversified portfolio.
However, SEC investigators later found billions were funneled into risky bets, related-party loans, and Stanford’s own spending. Redemptions were funded with cash from new investors.
Most of the money was held overseas, and victims are located in several countries around Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America.
Allen Stanford was indicted in 2009, shortly after the Madoff arrest. He was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to 110 years in prison.
Unlike the Bernie Madoff case, recovery has been slow. As of 2025, only around $2.7 billion has been recovered for about 18,000 victims. This is primarily due to the fact that Stanford spent the majority of the money funding his lavish lifestyle. He owned several private jets and even a 112-foot super yacht.
5. The OneCoin Cryptocurrency Scam (2014–2017)
- Estimated Losses: At least $4 billion (likely higher)
- Number of People Affected: More than 3.5 million victims
- Type of Scam: Ponzi scheme
- Tactics Used: Faked coin prices and claimed they had blockchain tech that didn’t exist
OneCoin was marketed as the “next Bitcoin”, but investigators later found that the company didn’t even use blockchain. It was a fake cryptocurrency company that scammed millions of individuals out of more than $4 billion.
Founded in 2014 and based in Bulgaria, the company sold “education packages” that came with OneCoin tokens, marketed as the next Bitcoin. In reality, U.S. prosecutors say the coin had no true market or blockchain behind it; the company simply set the price internally and made it go up on paper, regardless of supply or demand.
The “coin’s” growth came from recruitment, not technology. OneCoin functions as a multi-level marketing network that promised commissions for bringing in new buyers, which helped pull in billions of dollars from everyday investors in Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond.
Authorities have since seized and forfeited hundreds of millions of dollars linked to the scheme. In 2023, co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood received a 20-year U.S. prison sentence.
Ruja Ignatova, the public face of OneCoin known as the “Cryptoqueen,” disappeared in 2017. She was added to the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 2022 and, as of 2025, has yet to be caught. The FBI has placed a massive $5 million reward for information leading to her arrest.
6. Parmalat Financial Fraud (2003)
- Estimated Losses: €14 billion
- Number of People Affected: More than 135,000 investors
- Type of Scam: Accounting fraud
- Tactics Used: Fake assets, hidden debt, and complex offshore structures to mask losses.
Parmalat was an Italian dairy giant and the 8th largest company in Italy. At its peak, Parmalat controlled more than half of the milk derivatives in the country.
On December 8th, 2003, Parmalat missed a bond payment, which began to spark questions about the company’s liquidity.
Auditors then discovered that an account Parmalat claimed held €3.95 billion was forged and did not exist. That revelation exposed a much larger €14 billion hole and turned Parmalat into what many called “Europe’s Enron.”
By December 22nd, 2003, just 2 weeks after the initial missed payment, Parmalat stock had plummeted more than 97%.
Executives used shell companies in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and circular transactions to inflate assets and push debt off the main balance sheet.
The accounting fraud became Europe’s biggest corporate bankruptcy at the time.
Parmalat’s founder, Calisto Tanzi, and other executives were later convicted. Some funds were recovered through settlements with banks and auditors. Even so, bondholders and shareholders lost billions.
The scandal pushed Italy and the EU to tighten their regulations and shareholder protections. In Italy, the “Legge sul risparmio” (Law on Savings) was passed in 2005, which improved controls on the accountability of corporations.
7. The Bre-X Gold Mining Fraud (1990s)
- Estimated Losses: More than $3 billion
- Number of People Affected: 40,000 shareholders
- Type of Scam: Mining and securities fraud
- Tactics Used: “Salted” drill core samples with gold, inflated resource estimates, and issued misleading technical reports
Bre-X started as a little-known Canadian penny stock. In the mid-1990s, it claimed to have found one of the largest gold deposits in the world at Busang, in Indonesia.
As drill results were released, the reported size of the deposit ballooned, and Bre-X’s share price skyrocketed from cents to more than $250 by 1997.
Bre-X’s supposed “super deposit” at Busang was built on tampered drill samples. Investigators later concluded that core from the site had been “salted”, meaning that fine gold from other sources was added to the crushed rock before it went to the lab, making the assays look far richer than they really were.
The fraud started to unravel in 1997 when an independent due diligence program drilled its own holes at Busang and found almost no gold. Follow-up checks on Bre-X’s original samples confirmed they had been tampered with. Once these findings became public, the stock collapsed, wiping out more than $6 billion CAD of market value.
Surprisingly, despite the scale of the fraud, no one was ever convicted in the Bre-X case. The chief geologist, Michael de Guzman, died in 1997 after reportedly falling from a helicopter, and CEO David Walsh died in 1998 before any charges were filed.
Vice chairman John Felderhof was the only senior executive brought to trial, but he was ultimately acquitted in 2007 after a Canadian court ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to prove he was aware of the fraud.
The scam led to Canadian securities regulators introducing National Instrument 43-101, which now requires mining companies to back public resource claims with standardized technical reports and an independent “qualified person” to sign off.
8. FTX Cryptocurrency Collapse (2022)
- Estimated Losses: $8 to $10 billion
- Number of People Affected: More than 1 million customers and lenders
- Type of Scam: Embezzlement, Securities fraud
- Tactics Used: Funneled customer deposits to Alameda Research and spent the money on risky trades, loans, and investments.
The FTX collapse is one of the most recent major fraud cases on this list. The privately held company was the 3rd largest crypto exchange platform with more than 1 million users.
However, FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was quietly sending billions in customer deposits to his trading firm, Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried used customer funds for personal financing, venture deals, luxury property, and political donations.
On November 2nd, 2022, a leaked balance sheet raised concerns about FTX and Alameda’s finances. When users rushed to pull their money, the platform quickly ran out of cash. Just 9 days later, on November 11th, FTX filed for bankruptcy.
Restructuring specialist John J. Ray III, who also helped with the recovery following the Enron scandal, described that he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls.”
In 2023, Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven criminal counts and sentenced to 25 years.
FTX has recovered about $16.5 billion, enough to pay most customers at least 118% of their account value as of November 2022, but because claims are locked to crypto prices on the collapse date, many users still miss out on the market rebound that followed.
8. Wells Fargo Fake Accounts Scandal (2016)
- Estimated Losses: Wells Fargo lost more than $3 billion in fines and settlements
- Number of People Affected: 3.5 million unauthorized accounts created
- Type of Scam: Systemic sales-practices fraud
- Tactics Used: Opened customer accounts without consent and charged fees for unsolicited services.
Unlike most scams on this list, this case doesn’t involve a “fake” business model, Ponzi scheme, or obvious fraud.
The Wells Fargo accounts scandal involved a household-name bank defrauding its own customers.
Under intense pressure to hit daily “cross-sell” targets, employees quietly opened checking, savings, and credit card accounts in customers’ names without permission. They sometimes shifted money out of legitimate accounts to fund the new ones, set PINs to “0000” so they could enroll people in online banking. This triggered fees and even damaged customers' credit scores who had never asked for extra products.
Regulators first hit Wells Fargo with $185 million in fines in 2016 and estimated that about 2 million unauthorized accounts existed.
However, later reviews pushed that estimate to around 3.5 million. Refunds, lawsuits, a $3 billion 2020 DOJ settlement, and shareholder payouts have pushed the scandal to be one of the costliest controversies of all time.
The scandal forced out senior leaders, including CEO John Stumpf. In 2018, the Federal Reserve took a rare action and capped Wells Fargo’s asset size, a rare growth ban that lasted nearly seven years and was only lifted in 2025 once regulators deemed its controls fixed.
9. Charles Ponzi Original Scheme (1920)
- Estimated Losses: Around $20 million (roughly $300 million in today’s dollars)
- Number of People Affected: About 30,000 investors
- Type of Scam: Ponzi scheme
- Tactics Used: Promised unrealistically high returns from postal coupon arbitrage and used new investor money to pay earlier investors.
This is the original “Ponzi scheme” that gave this type of scam its name. Charles Ponzi promised investors 50% returns in 45 days (or 100% in 90 days), claiming he could exploit price differences in international postal reply coupons.
In reality, the scale of his promises made the strategy impossible; there were nowhere near enough coupons in circulation to support the profits he claimed. Instead, Ponzi paid “returns” to earlier investors using money from newer ones, inventing the classic scam that now bears his name.
For a while, early investors did get paid, which fueled a frenzy of word-of-mouth marketing and fresh deposits. But, eventually, recruitments slowed, and withdrawals grew, causing the scheme to collapse in the mid-1920s.
The “Ponzi scheme” became the archetype of investment fraud. It helped push regulators to enforce and expand early securities rules and shaped public skepticism of “too-good-to-be-true” returns.
10. McKesson & Robbins Securities Fraud (1938)
- Estimated Losses: $21 million in fake assets (worth $350 million today)
- Number of People Affected: Exact numbers are not known. But thousands of shareholders and creditors lost money.
- Type of Scam: Securities fraud
- Tactics Used: Invented inventory, fake cash balances, and sham supplier companies
McKesson & Robbins was a publicly traded U.S. pharmaceutical distributor whose 1937 balance sheet showed $87 million in assets.
However, investigators found that $19 to $21 million of that was completely fake. But this was only the beginning of the discoveries. The company’s president, Frank Donald Coster, was actually a career criminal named Phillip Musica using an alias.
Musica and his associates set up shell companies and forged documents to support non-existent inventory and customer debts. When the fraud came to light in 1938, investor confidence collapsed, and the case became one of the newly formed SEC’s first major enforcement actions.
The scandal helped reshape auditing. The SEC pushed public companies to use independent audit committees and have shareholders approve the external auditor.
11. Cambodian Scam Centers (Present)
- Estimated Losses: Tens of billions of dollars per year
- Number of People Affected: Millions of victims, more than 100,000 people forced to work in scam compounds.
- Type of Scam: Phishing/smishing
- Tactics Used: “Pig butchering” investment and romance scams, fake crypto and trading platforms, impersonation, extortion
Unlike most entries on this list, there isn’t a single company or individual responsible for carrying out this scam. Cambodian scam centers are a massive, organized network of criminal compounds run by transnational gangs.
Many of these are clustered around the seaside town of Sihanoukville, disguised inside former casinos.
These Cambodian scam operations are estimated to generate $12.5 to $19 billion a year, possibly approaching 60% of Cambodia’s GDP.
The main money-maker is “pig butchering, a sophisticated form of phishing in which scammers use WhatsApp, Telegram, dating apps, or social media to build fake relationships before convincing victims to invest large sums of money into fake cryptocurrencies.
The people actually carrying out these scams are trafficked and forced to hit daily scam quotas under threat of violence, torture, or sale to another compound.
Despite attempts by the Cambodian authorities to shut these operations down as well as sanctions from organizations like the UN and Amnesty International, many scam centers simply relocate or reopen under new names. Cambodian scam centers make up one of the most persistent and profitable scam ecosystems in the world.
12. Nigerian Advance-Fee Fraud Networks (419 Scam)
- Estimated Losses: Billions of dollars over the last few decades
- Number of People Affected: Millions of victims (mostly in the USA, UK, Australia, and Canada)
- Type of Scam: Advance-fee scam
- Tactics Used: Emotional email pitches, fake inheritances, business deals, romance scams, and up-front “processing” or “release” fees
Nigerian advance-fee fraud, also referred to as “419 scams” after the section of Nigeria’s criminal code, is one of the most famous (and longest-running) scam models in the world.
You’ve likely heard of the infamous “Nigerian Prince” scam, which was an early form of this scam in which victims were promised access to a huge inheritance if they first sent a few small “processing” fees.
Over time, the basic playbook of this scam spread into networks of scammers, including so-called “Yahoo boys” who became known for running these cons online. Today, these advance-fee scams have evolved. Some even develop long-term “romantic” relationships with victims to build trust.
Individuals have lost life savings to these scam operations. And while international operations between Nigerian authorities, the FBI, and European police have taken down some major rings, advance fee fraud is still a highly lucrative scam model due to the low cost to operate and endless supply of new targets.
Protect Yourself From Future Scams
There’s no question that there are some scams operating on an unbelievably massive scale. When analyzing the biggest scams in history, there are some obvious patterns.
If you want to take your scam protection to the next level, Lifeguard helps you shrink that attack surface. We scan major data brokers and people-search sites for your personal information, request removals on your behalf, and keep monitoring so you get alerts when new exposures appear.