Lying for Money is a comprehensive high-level look at financial fraud. You learn about everything from the early colonial fraudsters of the Mosquito Coast up to and including crypto and the Housing Market Collapse of 2008. The author is a financial writer who’s covered the field extensively and is only a _little_ insufferably smug.
Overall I don’t really know what to say about this book. I heard about it in the context of crypto fraud, and that section is glancing but fairly complete. It covers the overview of fraud as always built upon the exploitation of trust, which I haven’t really thought about but which makes plenty of sense. Fraud is enabled when we are more willing to take something at its word, and this is an important abstraction that allows our modern lives and economies to work. If you live in a low-trust society, you may require knowing someone closely in order to work with them, whereas modern white collar businesses will operate on gigantic deals that require no cash changing hands, merely the word of a trusted intermediary. I appreciate works like this, because that’s the sort of thing I don’t think about when I’m reading news about a massive financial crime and clutching my pearls wondering how, _how_, someone could have gotten away with this!
Read this book if you’re a big dork who likes to know things. Like me.
