Hi, I'm Barry Ritholz, and we are here with a steamed author Ben Carlson discussing his new book,

Don't Fall for it, a short history of financial scams.

Ben, welcome to the compound.

Thanks for having me guys.

So tell us a little bit about what motivated you to write a book about financial scams.

You got fraud, you got the fraud it, didn't you?

It was the Nigerian Prince Scam.

It got me the email.

So convincing.

Yeah, somehow people fall for that.

I actually found that dates back to not the email part,

but the actual scam of saying a prince has all this money you just

have to pay five thousand dollars and someone will get it for you because this king left all this

money for someone for an inheritance that days of act back to like the 1400s.

So people have been working on that one for like 600 years still.

What are the letter travel by, Lamb?

Carrier Pitching, I guess.

I got interested, I mean, there's a lot of the stuff going on lately I'm just kind of

over the success story stuff the here's someone that hit a home run and let's let's

backtrack and figure out how they did it Whereas I've been more interested lately in the

Fire Festival guy, Billy McFarland, and there and also with Elizabeth Holmes, figuring out

how someone was able to pull this stuff over on people. And I just became really interested in that

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