Good morning, John. I thought this was going to be a fun video,
but it's not.
I'm sorry. It took a turn.
And it ended up making me real mad.
So join me on this journey!
In 2005, a group of 25 guys rented a
commercial property in the center of Fortaleza, Brazil
and dug down underneath it tunneling more than
250 feet to a bank vault.
On Saturday, they broke through the vault, and on Sunday, they removed 3.5 tons
of 50 real bank notes.
A total that, converted to today's values, is around
a hundred million dollars.
This was, depending on how you count, the largest
bank robbery of all time. And it's basically nothing
compared to the largest thefts of all time. For those,
I had to look beyond what we think of traditionally as theft.
For one, it turns out that wasn't actually the largest bank
robbery in history by a long shot.
For that, we turn to 2015
when a group of hackers in China, Russia, and Europe were
able to extract somewhere between
300 and 900 million dollars from
a bunch of different banks using pretty common malware techniques
And none of them were ever caught,
and none of the banks released how much money was stolen,
and none of the money was ever recovered.
And I didn't even know about this.
It happened like four years ago.
Of course the biggest thefts turn out to not be from banks.
They're doing just fine, actually.
The biggest thefts are from people.
The lists of very big scams is very very long,
but let's look at the case of Gregor MacGregor.
During the mad rush of Europeans attempting to get rich by
investing in South America in the 1800s
Gregor claimed that he was the Cazique of Poyais
and began taking investment in a country that did not exist.
Now this wouldn't be quite so brazen if he hadn't put
hundreds of his investors onto two ships
with women and children sailing free
and sent them over to Poyais where they arrived in an untouched jungle
where most of them died.
So the murder angle makes this one a biggie for me.
When the Poyais bond market collapsed, because it didn't exist,
4.5 billion dollars was wiped out.
Let's put that on the graph next to the biggest
robbery of all time.
And yet, even that ain't much when compared to Bernie Madoff.
He ended up stealing about 20 billion dollars
He did not just steal from rich people.
A lot of the money invested with him was from pension funds
who were just trying to make money so that people retiring could live.
But here's where it really went south for me. Instead of individual,
one-off crimes, I decided to look at property crime in general.
All robberies, all theft, all burglary, all auto theft per year added up
is less than Bernie Madoff stole.
Now this is per year; Bernie stole over a number of years
so it's not really a fair comparison, I guess. But since we're adding
stuff up and looking at property crime
let's also add in the largest category of property crime: wage theft!
That's when an employer steals a worker's labor by not paying them
their legally required wages and benefits.
Per year, somewhere between 20 and 60 billion dollars of labor
is stolen from workers in the US. More than Madoff stole, every year.
More than all other property crime.
More than every stolen car,
burglary, shoplifting, all that stuff combined.
And yet, while there are hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers
Who work on all those property crime bits,
There are around a thousand who work on wage theft.
And the companies doing it find it more efficient to
pay the fines than actually pay their workers,
as Walmart has done 96 times in the last 20 years.
I myself know about wage theft
because I actually got a wage theft settlement
after working for Walmart for a summer.
So John, the biggest theft of all time?
It's one that is ongoing, that everybody knows about,
that has profoundly more impact on the already disadvantaged,
one that most people have been a victim of, and one that
almost no one has ever gone to jail for.
That...
is quite a heist.
I'll see you on Tuesday.