There seem to be two basic approaches to financial fraud. One approach is to pretend to do a real thing as accurately as possible, with the minimum necessary tweaks to make it a fraud. You run a real company and come to work every day doing real stuff, but then you quietly change a few numbers in the financial reports to get yourself a bigger bonus. You set up a hedge fund and tell people that it will do some real strategy in which you can plausibly claim expertise, you give them sensible-looking account statements showing their money growing at an impressive but realistic rate, and then you steal it all. The implicit theory here is that people know what the real thing looks like, and if you can make your fake thing look exactly like the real thing then you will be able to steal a lot of money and not get caught.
The other, opposite approach is just to accumulate fantasy. You set up a hedge fund that will use quantum algorithms based on astrology to trade prime bank certificates on the Ruritanian Exchange, and that promises a risk-free return of 100% per month, over the blockchain, and the portfolio manager is Elvis. And then you steal the money and tell your investors that aliens took it. The theory here is harder to pin down. One possibility is the sort of Nigerian-scammer-typo theory: You make the scheme implausible to attract only the most gullible victims, the ones who have no idea what the real thing looks like and who will give you all of their money. Another possibility is that, you know, not all scammers are entirely right in the head themselves, and many have only a sketchy knowledge of what is plausible in legitimate business.
