Sam Antar is a site friend round here, as he runs the excellent scambusting website White Collar Fraud that is out there pointing the finger at dubious accounting practices and SEC filings in U.S. listed companies. And Antar should know, as he himself is a convicted felon for accounting fraud (check out his highly entertaining posts and disclaimers that tell you straight who he is right here).
So National Public Radio has, as part of its Planet Money series, interviewed Sam Antar and the result is out today right here in podcast form. If you want to know how the white collar criminal's mind works and just why people feel compelled to rip others off via dubious enterprises (and my stars, there's plenty to go around in our chosen field of junior miners), the Antar interview is well worth listening to. Here's the link again so no excuses, leave this humble corner of cyberspace immediately and do something worthwhile with your online time. Here's the blurb from NPR to get you in the mood:
In the seventies and eighties, the Antar family ran Crazy Eddie, a popular electronics chain known for its frenetic commercials.
The business was crooked from the start, but the fraud got more serious when the family took the company public in the 1984. In 1987, the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the family and discovered years of inflated profits and overstated income.
On today's show, one of the masterminds of the fraud, Eddie's cousin Sam Antar, explains how they did it and why it worked for so long.