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Reading List · Fraud and ScamsThe Best Books About Fraud and Scams
Fraud stories are rarely just about money. They are about trust: why investors, regulators, journalists and ordinary people believe things that turn out to be false, and why the warning signs are so often ignored until it is too late. Books about fraud and scams range from investigative accounts of collapsed companies and Ponzi schemes to psychological studies of con artists, and they tend to reveal as much about the systems that failed as about the people who cheated them.
This list leans towards non-fiction: reported books on Theranos, Enron, 1MDB, Bernie Madoff, Deutsche Bank and the crypto boom, plus two books that explain how and why fraud works. Two novels close the list, one based on a real Victorian impostor case and one about a fictional con man. Several of the books have been adapted for film or television.
Thirteen books about fraud and scams
Bad Blood
John Carreyrou · 2018
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup tells the story of Theranos, the blood-testing company founded by Elizabeth Holmes, which claimed it could run a wide range of tests from a few drops of blood. Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who first exposed the company, reconstructs how the technology failed and how that failure was hidden.
It is one of the defining books about start-up fraud: a close look at how charisma, secrecy, investor pressure and legal intimidation kept a deception going for years. It won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award in 2018.
Read it if you want a fast-paced, reported account of a Silicon Valley company built on claims that did not hold up.
Read my full recommendation →The Smartest Guys in the Room
Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind · 2003
Two Fortune journalists trace the rise and collapse of Enron, the Houston energy company that became one of the largest corporate scandals in American history. The book follows its executives, its aggressive accounting and its trading culture, and explains how the company’s reported success concealed mounting losses.
It is a foundational book on corporate accounting fraud and on how auditors, banks and analysts went along with it. It formed the basis of the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, directed by Alex Gibney.
Read it if you want to understand how a celebrated company hid its problems inside its own financial statements.
Billion Dollar Whale
Tom Wright and Bradley Hope · 2018
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World follows Jho Low, a Malaysian financier at the centre of the 1MDB scandal, in which money from a Malaysian state investment fund was diverted on a vast scale. Two Wall Street Journal reporters trace where the money went, from banks to yachts, art and film financing.
It shows fraud on an international scale, involving a sovereign fund, global banks and celebrities, and how a single well-connected operator moved through all of them. It suits readers interested in money laundering and political corruption.
Read it if you want a globe-trotting account of one of the largest financial scandals of recent decades.
The Big Short
Michael Lewis · 2010
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine follows a small group of investors who saw that the American subprime mortgage market was built on loans that would fail, and bet against it before the 2008 financial crisis. Lewis explains complex products such as mortgage bonds and credit default swaps through the people who traded them.
It is less about a single swindler than about a system that hid risk and misled the people buying mortgage-backed investments. It was adapted into the 2015 film The Big Short.
Read it if you want the 2008 financial crisis explained through characters rather than charts.
The Wizard of Lies
Diana B. Henriques · 2011
The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust is a detailed account of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the largest in history, by a New York Times financial journalist. Henriques covers how the scheme worked, who invested, the missed warnings, and the consequences for victims and for Madoff’s family.
It is a central book for anyone trying to understand Ponzi schemes and why regulators failed to stop one for decades. It was adapted into a 2017 HBO film starring Robert De Niro, in which Henriques played herself.
Read it if you want the fullest account of the Madoff fraud and the people it ruined.
Catch Me If You Can
Frank W. Abagnale with Stan Redding · 1980
Frank Abagnale’s memoir describes his teenage years as a cheque forger and impostor, claiming to have posed as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer while evading the authorities. Written with Stan Redding, it became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.
It belongs on a fraud list for a second reason: many of the book’s claims have since been questioned, notably in Alan C. Logan’s book The Greatest Hoax on Earth. It is best read as a con artist’s own story, not a verified record.
Read it if you want the classic con-man story and are curious about how much of it is true.
The Confidence Game
Maria Konnikova · 2016
The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time examines the psychology of con artists and their targets. Konnikova, a psychologist and writer, combines research with stories of real swindles to break a con into stages, from choosing a victim to keeping them quiet afterwards.
Where most books on this list tell one story, this one explains the pattern behind all of them: why intelligent, sceptical people are still deceived, and why many victims never report it.
Read it if you want to understand why people fall for scams, not only how a specific scam worked.
Lying for Money
Dan Davies · 2018
Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World sorts fraud into a small number of basic types, such as long firms, counterfeits and control frauds, and uses historical cases to show how each one works. Davies, a former financial analyst, writes about fraud as a product of the trust that modern economies depend on.
It works well as a framework for the rest of this list: after reading it, the cases of Enron, Madoff and Theranos become easier to place, compare and recognise as variations on older patterns.
Read it if you want a clear, analytical overview of how fraud works across history.
Dark Towers
David Enrich · 2020
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction traces how Deutsche Bank expanded aggressively into investment banking and became entangled in a long series of scandals, including money laundering and market manipulation. Enrich, a New York Times finance editor, also follows the bank’s lending relationship with Donald Trump.
It shows fraud and misconduct at the level of an institution rather than one individual: a culture that pursued profit, tolerated wrongdoing and kept paying fines until scandal became routine.
Read it if you want a reported account of how a major bank lost its way.
Number Go Up
Zeke Faux · 2023
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall is a Bloomberg reporter’s investigation into the cryptocurrency boom and bust. Faux travels from conferences and exchanges to the scam compounds behind so-called pig-butchering schemes, and covers the collapse of FTX.
It is one of the most direct books on crypto fraud, written from a sceptical position and covering both large-scale collapses and the individual victims of online investment scams around the world.
Read it if you want a sceptical, ground-level investigation of fraud in the crypto industry.
Going Infinite
Michael Lewis · 2023
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon follows Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the crypto exchange FTX, from his early career to the exchange’s collapse in late 2022. Lewis spent extended time with Bankman-Fried before and after FTX failed, and the book draws on that access.
It is a useful companion to Number Go Up because it takes a very different angle. Several reviewers argued that Lewis was too sympathetic to his subject, which is itself part of what makes it interesting on a fraud list.
Read it if you want an inside view of FTX and are happy to weigh it against more critical accounts.
The Fraud
Zadie Smith · 2023
Zadie Smith’s first historical novel is set around the Tichborne case, the Victorian trial of a man who claimed to be the missing heir to a baronetcy. It is told largely through Eliza Touchet, housekeeper and cousin by marriage to the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, and also draws on the story of Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved Jamaican man who testified in the case.
It asks why so many people wanted to believe an obvious impostor, and connects the trial to questions of class, empire and who gets to tell the truth in public.
Read it if you want a literary novel about a real Victorian con and the public that believed it.
The Talented Mr Ripley
Patricia Highsmith · 1955
Tom Ripley, a small-time swindler in New York, is sent to Italy to bring home a wealthy young American, Dickie Greenleaf. Instead he becomes fascinated by Dickie’s life and begins to take it over. Highsmith’s novel follows Ripley as he improvises lies, forgeries and false identities to stay ahead.
It is the classic literary portrait of an impostor, told from inside his head rather than from the side of his victims. It was adapted into the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, directed by Anthony Minghella.
Read it if you want a suspense novel that puts you inside the mind of a con artist.
Which book should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first fraud book — Bad Blood by John Carreyrou (2018)
- For corporate accounting fraud — The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (2003)
- For Ponzi schemes — The Wizard of Lies by Diana B. Henriques (2011)
- For the psychology of scams — The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova (2016)
- For crypto fraud — Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (2023)
- For a novel — The Fraud by Zadie Smith (2023)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
What is the best book about fraud to start with?
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is a common starting point: it reads like a thriller, covers a recent case, and won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award in 2018.
What is a good book about how scams work in general?
The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova covers the psychology of con artists and their victims, while Lying for Money by Dan Davies sorts frauds into basic types and explains how each works.
Which book covers the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme?
The Wizard of Lies by Diana B. Henriques is a detailed account of the Madoff fraud. It was adapted into a 2017 HBO film starring Robert De Niro.
Are there good books about crypto fraud?
Number Go Up by Zeke Faux investigates the crypto boom and the scams around it, and Going Infinite by Michael Lewis follows Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX. Reading both gives two quite different perspectives.
Which of these books have been made into films?
The Big Short (2015 film), The Wizard of Lies (2017 HBO film), Catch Me If You Can (2002 film), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999 film) and The Smartest Guys in the Room, which became the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
Are there novels about fraud and con artists?
Yes. The Fraud by Zadie Smith is based on the Victorian Tichborne impostor case, and The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith follows a fictional con man who takes over another man’s life.
Pick the book that answers the question you are asking right now. The rest of the list will still be here when you are ready for the next one.
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