In 2015, one of Japan's most respected industrial names admitted that for seven straight years, it had been quietly inflating its own profits — not by a little, but by more than one billion dollars.

In April 2011, a newly appointed chief executive was fired by his own board just two weeks into the job, after he asked one question they didn't want to answer: where, exactly, had a billion and a half dollars gone?

A Belgian company claimed its speech-recognition software could understand human language better than any competitor on Earth. What investigators eventually found was that most of the customers buying that software didn't actually exist.

The video showed a sleek pickup truck rolling smoothly across a flat stretch of desert highway. What it didn't show was that the truck had no working engine, and that the whole thing was simply rolling downhill.

In December 2012, one of Wall Street's most successful hedge fund managers stood on a stage in New York for a presentation that ran more than three hours, and bet more than a billion dollars of his investors' money that a nutrition company was, in his words, the highest-profile pyramid scheme in history.

On a Wednesday, regulators watched a bank take in billions of dollars in withdrawal requests. By Friday morning, the same bank no longer existed.

It started as a police investigation into a handful of men laundering money through a gas station car wash in Brasília. By the time it ended, it had touched a former president, dozens of executives, and one of the largest state-owned companies on Earth.

In late March 2021, a family office that almost nobody outside Wall Street had heard of lost more money in forty-eight hours than most hedge funds make in a decade — and it did so using a financial structure specifically designed to stay invisible.