Top 3 Financial Frauds

Financial frauds have always been of great interest to the general public. Billions of dollars lost, life imprisonments and capital punishments awarded. The revealed facts sound unbelievable.
Bernard Madoff is one of the most legendary fraudsters of America. Born in 1938, Madoff was a stockbroker, financial adviser and a non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market.
In 1960 Madoff founded the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, which he was managing until his arrest. The firm was an instrument for a Ponzi scheme that was considered the largest financial fraud ever. It was Madoff's son who reported him to the SEC when almost $65 billion was missing from client accounts. He received a 150-year prison sentence that maximum allowed by the law.
Nick Leeson born in 1967 is a famous "rogue trader". He managed to cause a collapse of Barings Bank, the United Kingdom's oldest merchant bank by falsifying accounts.
Leeson was making unauthorised speculative trades to the Singapore and Tokyo stock exchanges and was using special error accounts to hide his losses. Eventually he lost £830 million and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Not only private individuals but also famous companies have been involved in massive frauds.
Arthur Andersen LLP which was one of the Big Five accounting firms was hiding the huge debts of energy giant Enron while auditing its balance sheets. As a result, shareholders lost $74 billion and the "Big Five" was transformed into the Big Four in 2002.