Will I love Lying for Money?

Davies’ Lying For Money lays out a taxonomy of fraud, illustrated with amazing stories of real-life frauds.

Per Davies: “A long firm makes you question whether you can trust anyone. A counterfeit makes you question the evidence of your eyes. A control fraud makes you question your trust in the institutions of society and a market crime makes you question society itself.”

Davies’ key trick to spotting a fraud: look at something that’s growing unusually quickly, and examine it in some way it hasn’t been examined before.

Only the second chapter is about cryptocurrency specifically, but understanding how frauds think… show more.

What’s especially attractive about this book is its attempt to put some analytical structure on the otherwise rather anecdotal historiography of financial scams.

Dan Davies dips into a large number of these stories, some more familiar than others, to illustrate common themes. He identifies four distinct categories of financial fraud and shows how the case studies can be interpreted as falling into one or other of these types.

I like his characterization of how trust and betrayal arrive at an equilibrium when, because trust is socially valuable, and because it is too costly to check thoroughly against all abuses, there… show more.