Matt Levine, Columnist

Fear Is a Good Motivation for Fraud

Also Wormhole’s exploit, ARK’s customer loyalty, Alphabet’s stock split, Elon Musk’s Twitter lawsuits and a hollow gold cube.

February 3, 2022 at 5:56 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.

One way to do fraud when you are pitching an investment is to lie about the investment. “Our thing has guaranteed 20% monthly returns with no risk,” you say, and then you steal all the money. This is pretty common.