Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World
Dan Davies spent years as a banking analyst watching companies blow up in slow motion, and this book grew out of his effort to categorize why. He proposes a taxonomy of commercial fraud, the long firm, counterfeiting, control fraud, market crimes, and pyramid schemes, and walks through the history of each with cases from the salad oil swindle to Bernie Madoff to OPM Leasing. The through-line is that fraud is the price a society pays for trust, that any economy efficient enough to run on paperwork and reputation will be periodically looted by people willing to abuse both. Davies writes with the dry humor of someone who has watched too many earnings calls, and the book has become a touchstone for financial regulators, journalists, and payments engineers trying to understand how systems fail.
What you might want to know about Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A former banking analyst tours the great commercial frauds of the last two centuries and argues that fraud is a byproduct of the trust that makes modern economies possible.
McKenzie has repeatedly named this book as the best single volume on the sociology of fraud, and cites it constantly in his writing on payments, banking, and why financial systems fail in the specific ways they do.
It uses real cases as illustrations, but the aim is analytical, closer to a working taxonomy of fraud than a set of standalone crime stories.
Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World was written by Dan Davies, published in 2018 by Scribner.
Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
