'The story of Mrs. Gordon Baillie is stranger than anything to be met with in the field of fiction.' Mrs. Gordon Baillie, known throughout her life as Annie, was born in the direst poverty in the ...small Scottish fishing town of Peterhead in 1848\. Illegitimate and illiterate her beauty and intelligence nevertheless enabled her to overcome her circumstances and become a charming and wealthy socialite living a life of luxury whilst raising money for worthy causes and charitable works. Behind her supposed perfect and contented life, however, lay one of the most notorious and compulsive swindlers of the Victorian Age. Her fraudulent fundraising and larger-than-life schemes played out across four decades and three continents, Europe, America and Australasia, and involved land owners crofters, aristocrats, politicians, bankers, socialist revolutionaries, operatic stars and the cultural icons of the day. She became mistress to a rich aristocrat, married a world-renowned male opera singer and later took as a lover a vicar's son with anarchist tendencies. For most of her 'career' she kept one step ahead of the law and her nemesis, Inspector Henry Marshall of Scotland Yard, but finally becoming undone through her own compulsion for petty theft, despite her amassed fortune. During her life she used more than 40 aliases, produced four children and spent her way through millions of ill-gotten pounds, dollars and other currencies. But at the turn of the twentieth century, her notoriety was such that she took refuge in America and disappeared from history.
Online markets in cryptocurrency represent a sprawling and eclectic alternative financial system, selling cutting edge techno-investment schemes that are complex and high risk. Crime control is ...almost entirely absent from this new crypto economy, and it is full of scams. This paper draws on an ethnography of crypto trading to review the main types of scam, suggesting that the grey economy of cryptocurrency trading is part of a wider evolution of society towards the technosocial, and beyond that perhaps towards the metaversal.
Exploring the interplay of love, money and threat in romance fraud, this Element reveals how language is used to persuade, manipulate, and threaten without causing alarm. It provides the first ...empirical examination of criminal interactions-in-action that exposes and tracks the grooming process and manipulation techniques from first contact with the fraudster, to the transition between romance and finance, and requests for money and intimate images, before morphing into explicit threats and acts of sextortion. Through the use of a range of interactional methodologies and real romance fraud messages, a new type of criminality in the form of 'romance fraud enabled sextortion' is revealed. The insights contained in this work have clear implications for future directions of academic exploration and practitioner efforts to protect the public. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The story of Mrs. Gordon Baillie is stranger than anything to be met with in the field of fiction.'Mrs. Gordon Baillie, known throughout her life as Annie, was born in the direst poverty in the small ...Scottish fishing town of Peterhead in 1848. Illegitimate and illiterate, her beauty and intelligence nevertheless enabled her to overcome her circumstances and become a charming and wealthy socialite living a life of luxury while raising money for worthy causes and charitable works.Behind her supposed perfect and contented life, however, lay one of the most notorious and compulsive swindlers of the Victorian Age. Her fraudulent fundraising and larger-than-life schemes played out across four decades and three continents, and involved land owners, crofters, aristocrats, politicians, bankers, socialist revolutionaries, operatic stars, and the cultural icons of the day.She became mistress to a rich aristocrat, married a world-renowned male opera singer and later took as a lover a vicar's son with anarchist tendencies. For most of her 'career' she kept one step ahead of the law and her nemesis, Inspector Henry Marshall of Scotland Yard, but finally becoming undone through her own compulsion for petty theft, despite her amassed fortune.During her life she used more than 40 aliases, produced four children and spent her way through millions in ill-gotten wealth. But at the turn of the twentieth century, her notoriety was such that she took refuge in America and disappeared from history.
The book of swindles Zhang, Yingyu; Rea, Christopher G; Rusk, Bruce
2017, 20170905
eBook
This is an age of deception. Con men ply the roadways. Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three. Devious nuns entice young women into adultery. Sorcerers use charmed talismans ...for mind control and murder. A pair of dubious monks extorts money from a powerful official and then spends it on whoring. A rich student tries to bribe the chief examiner, only to hand his money to an imposter. A eunuch kidnaps boys and consumes their "essence" in an attempt to regrow his penis. These are just a few of the entertaining and surprising tales to be found in this seventeenth-century work, said to be the earliest Chinese collection of swindle stories.The Book of Swindles, compiled by an obscure writer from southern China, presents a fascinating tableau of criminal ingenuity. The flourishing economy of the late Ming period created overnight fortunes for merchants-and gave rise to a host of smooth operators, charlatans, forgers, and imposters seeking to siphon off some of the new wealth.The Book of Swindles, which was ostensibly written as a manual for self-protection in this shifting and unstable world, also offers an expert guide to the art of deception. Each story comes with commentary by the author, Zhang Yingyu, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle. This volume, which contains annotated translations of just over half of the eighty-odd stories in Zhang's original collection, provides a wealth of detail on social life during the late Ming and offers words of warning for a world in peril.
This is an age of deception. Con men ply the roadways. Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three. Devious nuns entice young women into adultery. Sorcerers use charmed talismans ...for mind control and murder. A pair of dubious monks extorts money from a powerful official and then spends it on whoring. A rich student tries to bribe the chief examiner, only to hand his money to an imposter. A eunuch kidnaps boys and consumes their essence in an attempt to regrow his penis. These are just a few of the entertaining and surprising tales to be found in this seventeenth-century work, said to be the earliest Chinese collection of swindle stories.The Book of Swindles, compiled by an obscure writer from southern China, presents a fascinating tableau of criminal ingenuity. The flourishing economy of the late Ming period created overnight fortunes for merchants-and gave rise to a host of smooth operators, charlatans, forgers, and imposters seeking to siphon off some of the new wealth. The Book of Swindles, which was ostensibly written as a manual for self-protection in this shifting and unstable world, also offers an expert guide to the art of deception. Each story comes with commentary by the author, Zhang Yingyu, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle. This volume, which contains annotated translations of just over half of the eighty-odd stories in Zhang's original collection, provides a wealth of detail on social life during the late Ming and offers words of warning for a world in peril.
Examining a shocking array of fraud, corruption, theft, and embezzlement cases, this vivid collection reveals the practice of detecting, investigating, prosecuting, defending, and resolving ...white-collar crimes. Each chapter is a case study of an illustrative criminal case and draws on extensive public records around both obscure and high-profile crimes of the powerful, such as money laundering, mortgage fraud, public corruption, securities fraud, environmental crimes, and Ponzi schemes. Organized around a consistent analytic framework, each case tells a unique story and provides an engaging introduction to these complex crimes, while also introducing students to the practical aspects of investigation and prosecution of white-collar offenses. Jennifer C. Noble's text takes students to the front lines of these vastly understudied crimes, preparing them for future practice and policy work.
Bankruptcy grifters Simon, Lindsey D
The Yale law journal,
02/2022, Letnik:
131, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Grifters take advantage of situations, latching on to others for benefits they do not deserve. Bankruptcy has many desirable benefits, especially for mass-tort defendants. Bankruptcy provides a ...centralized proceeding for resolving claims and a forum of last resort for many companies to aggregate and resolve mass-tort liability. For the debtor-defendant, this makes sense. A bankruptcy court's tremendous power represents a well-considered balance between debtors who have a limited amount of money and many claimants seeking payment. But courts have also allowed the Bankruptcy Code's mechanisms to be used by solvent, nondebtor companies and individuals facing mass-litigation exposure. These "bankruptcy grifters" act as parasites, receiving many of the substantive and procedural benefits of a host bankruptcy, but incurring only a fraction of the associated burdens. In exchange for the protections of bankruptcy, a debtor incurs the reputational cost and substantial scrutiny mandated by the bankruptcy process. Bankruptcy grifters do not. This dynamic has become evident in a number of recent, high-profile bankruptcies filed in the wake of pending mass-tort litigation, such as the Purdue Pharma and USA Gymnastics suits. This article is the first to call attention to the growing prevalence of bankruptcy grifters in mass-tort cases. By charting the progression of non-debtor relief from asbestos and product-liability bankruptcies to cases arising out of the opioid epidemic and sex-abuse scandals, this article explains how courts allowed piecemeal expansion to fundamentally change the scope of bankruptcy protections. This article proposes specific procedural and substantive safeguards that would deter bankruptcy-grifter opportunism and increase transparency, thereby protecting victims as well as the bankruptcy process.
