But in this particular case, his name isn’t Bernie Madoff. It’s Ian Bick.
By 2013, Bick was an 18-year-old event promoter with multiple businesses in Danbury, Connecticut. On the outside, they seemed to be the successful ventures of an entrepreneurial prodigy. But behind the scenes, “it was a free-for-all s**tshow,” Bick says in “Generation Hustle,” HBO Max’s new anthology series about the young, ambitious and fraudulent.
While Bick says he wasn’t trying to run a Ponzi scheme — “I looked at it as taking one loan to pay off another loan,” Bick explains in the series — the feds disagreed. In 2016, Bick was convicted of defrauding his business investors of nearly $500,000.
1. Charles Ponzi — $15 million
Compared to today’s notorious cons, the loss associated with this scam in 1920 might seem a pittance. But in the tale of Charles Ponzi, it wasn’t just the size of the swindle but the speed with which it was done. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Ponzi made an estimated $15 million in eight months by convincing lenders he could make them rich with investments in international postal reply coupons. His story was so infamous that the basics of the pyramid scheme — take money from a new investor to pay back an old one — began to carry his name, despite the fact that he wasn’t the first to do it.
2. Lou Pearlman — $300 million
The man behind platinum-selling boy bands ‘NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, Lou Pearlman’s legacy also includes a massive Ponzi scheme. In addition to
