Samuel Israel III was a New York hedge fund manager who founded the Bayou Hedge Fund Group in 1996 and orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds of the early 2000s. After years of falsifying trading records and using a fake accounting firm to hide losses, Israel’s $300 million Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2005 when investors tried to withdraw their money. Facing charges of fraud and conspiracy, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In a bizarre twist, just before reporting to prison in 2008, Israel staged his own death.
Gilberte Van Erpe aka Madame Gil is a Belgian con artist who launched a fake health and cosmetics company called Crema in the early 2000s. Posing as the mystical “Madame Gil,” she convinced thousands of people- especially in Chile- to invest in a bogus line of “magic cheese” and other products that supposedly contained miraculous healing or cosmetic properties. Investors were promised huge profits from selling this special cheese, but the entire operation was a pyramid scheme.
In 2003, Thomas “Bart” Whitaker orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against his own family in Sugar Land, Texas, in order to claim his inheritance. After luring his parents and brother home from a celebratory dinner, his friend Christopher Brashear ambushed them inside the house, killing Bart’s mother and brother and seriously wounding his father, Kent.
Mississippi Elvis impersonator Paul Kevin Curtis was wrongly accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Obama, Senator Roger Wicker, and a local judge. Curtis had a history of posting online about an alleged hospital cover-up after he claimed to have discovered human body parts in 2001 while working as a janitor.
In December 2023, 44-year-old Daniel Krug of Broomfield, Colorado murdered his wife, Kristil Krug, in the garage of their home after months of secretly tormenting her with fake messages from a made-up stalker he created using burner phones and multiple online identities. Posing as her ex-boyfriend Jack, Daniel sent harassing emails and photos to both himself and Kristil to convince her she was being watched, all while portraying himself as her protector.
In 1994, Bobbi Parker, the wife of an Oklahoma prison deputy warden, vanished from the Oklahoma State Reformatory along with inmate Randolph Dial, a convicted murderer and artist who had been given unusual privileges due to his painting skills. For 11 years, the two lived under assumed identities on a remote chicken farm in Texas until their discovery in 2005.
Gerald Barnbaum was a conman who spent decades posing as a medical doctor despite never being one. Born in 1933 in Chicago, he was originally a licensed pharmacist, but his license was revoked. Rather than reform, Barnbaum found a new and more dangerous way to exploit the medical system: he began impersonating real physicians, using their stolen identities to practice medicine illegally.
In November 1971, Theo Albrecht, the reclusive German billionaire co-founder of Aldi supermarkets, was kidnapped at gunpoint outside his company’s headquarters in Essen, Germany, by Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg and Paul Krüzen, a pair of small-time criminals seeking a massive ransom. The kidnappers held him for 17 days.
Matthew Muller was a former Marine and Harvard-educated lawyer whose life spiraled into a series of bizarre crimes. In 2015, he broke into the Vallejo, California home of Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn, abducting Denise and demanding ransom in what police initially dismissed as a hoax inspired by Gone Girl. Muller, who suffered from mental illness and believed he was a kind of vigilante, held Huskins captive for two days before releasing her.
Kwang Chol Joy was a California man who became infatuated with 37-year-old Maribel Ramos, an Army veteran and college student who had taken him in as a roommate in her Orange County apartment. Over time, his obsession with her deepened, but she rejected his romantic advances and eventually asked him to move out. In May 2013, shortly after a heated argument about rent, Maribel disappeared. Weeks later, her remains were discovered in a remote canyon
Barry Minkow was a teenage entrepreneur who founded the carpet-cleaning company ZZZZ Best in the 1980s and became a Wall Street sensation- until it was revealed to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of its time. Minkow fabricated fake restoration projects and used forged documents to trick investors, inflating his company’s value to over $200 million before it collapsed in 1987.
Israel Keyes was an American serial killer, burglar, and arsonist who operated from 2001 until his arrest in 2012. A meticulous and methodical predator, he murdered at least eleven people across the United States, hiding “kill kits” containing weapons and supplies years in advance to use during his crimes.
John DeLorean was a trailblazing automobile executive who rose to prominence at General Motors by engineering iconic muscle cars like the Pontiac GTO and Firebird. In 1975 he struck out on his own and founded the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC), aiming to build a futuristic sports car—the DMC-12 with gull-wing doors and stainless steel panels. Unfortunately, despite early hype, DMC’s production launch in 1981 suffered cost overruns, delays, and poor market timing, and by 1982 the company was insolvent. In a desperate bid to save his enterprise, DeLorean became entangled in a high-profile FBI sting involving drug trafficking.
Bernie Madoff was an American financier who ran what is widely regarded as the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors of billions of dollars by paying returns to earlier investors with funds from newer ones rather than from legitimate profits.
Jermell Jones is a 41-year-old Florida man who was arrested in July 2025 while working as the mascot for Chuck E. Cheese in Tallahassee. He was taken into custody in full costume during a children’s birthday party after surveillance linked him to using a woman’s child-support debit card to make fraudulent charges.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer is a Canadian former registered nurse who confessed to murdering eight elderly patients and attempting to kill six others between 2007 and 2016 in long-term care homes in southwestern Ontario.
Todd Davis, the co-founder and CEO of LifeLock, became famous in 2007 for publicly displaying his real Social Security number in ads to prove confidence in his company’s identity-theft protection service. But the stunt backfired when his identity was stolen at least a dozen times, exposing flaws in LifeLock’s system.
Pedro Rodrigues Filho was a Brazilian serial killer who claimed to have murdered more than 100 people- most of them other criminals.
Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a Harvard-educated mathematician who abandoned academia to live in a remote Montana cabin, and between 1978 and 1995 carried out a nationwide bombing spree targeting universities, airlines and individuals he believed were advancing technology.
Joran van der Sloot whose criminal history includes the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores Ramírez in Lima, Peru- he was convicted and sentenced to 28 years in prison for the crime. He first came to international attention as the prime suspect in the disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005.