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Joan Anderson pitched the idea and the name for one of the best selling toys in history, sealed it with a handshake, and watched 100 million units sell without receiving a dime. This episode tells her story. On a trip back to her native Australia in the 1950s she saw schoolchildren twirling bamboo rings around their waists, a craze so strong that Sydney teachers used the hoops in physical education classes and department stores ran out of stock. She had her mother ship one across the Pacific, and she and her husband Wayne took it to Wham-O with a name attached: Hula Hoop.

The episode explains why a handshake seemed reasonable at the time. A circle cannot be patented, and the toy business ran on informal deals. It then follows the summer of 1958, when Wham-O's 42 inch Marlex hoops sold for 1.98 dollars and set off a national mania, and the 1960 lawsuit in which the company claimed it had made no profit. Along the way it reaches back to hoops of willow and grapevine from 500 BC and forward to fitness hoops and fire performers.

• Australian toy maker Alex Tolmer of Toltoys sold about 400,000 polyethylene hoops in a year, then gave Wham-O the concept in return for sponsoring one bed in a children's hospital.
• Wham-O sold 25 million hoops in roughly four months and more than 100 million within two years, with one outside manufacturer molding 50,000 a day.
• In 14th century England, doctors treated hoopers for dislocated backs and even heart failure.
• When demand collapsed, Wham-O was buried in unsold inventory and stopped making hoops until 1965, when it returned with ball bearings inside the tubing.
• Anderson settled her suit for 6,000 dollars. She lived to 101 and saw the Hula Hoop enter the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1999.

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The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo is remembered through a music hall hit, a 1935 film, and a stage musical. The real Charles Deville Wells was a serial fraudster. Born in Hertfordshire in 1841 and raised in France, he grew up fluent in two cultures and able to vanish across the Channel whenever one country grew too hot. He was also a real engineer: in 1868 he invented a device to regulate ship propellers and sold the patent for 5,000 francs, about five times his yearly salary. This episode argues that the windfall taught him selling an invention was easier than building one.

What followed was a phantom French railway in 1879, bogus patents sold to British aristocrats, and then the 1891 run at the roulette tables that made him a legend. The episode explains what breaking the bank really meant, follows the winnings into a yacht with a ballroom for 50 guests, and tracks his arrest, his years in Portland Prison, and a final Paris scheme that ran a Ponzi operation a decade before Charles Ponzi.

• Each Monte Carlo table started the day with a reserve of 100,000 francs. When a player emptied it, staff draped the table in black cloth until fresh funds arrived from the vaults.
• One British backer of his fake inventions lost the equivalent of nearly 1.9 million pounds in today's money.
• Convicted at the Old Bailey in March 1893 on 23 counts of fraud, Wells was sentenced to eight years and served six.
• In prison he spent two days in solitary for giving a loaf of bread to another inmate, and later played The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo on the chapel organ.
• In 1910, as Lucien Rivier, he opened a Paris bank promising 1 percent a day and took two million francs from 6,000 investors, prompting France to tighten vetting of private bank owners.

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In 1902 a Paris court forced open the iron safe that had backed twenty years of bank loans. Creditors expected the Crawford millions in bearer bonds. They found old newspapers, a trouser button, and an Italian coin. This episode tells how Therese Humbert, born Therese Daurignac to a peasant family in 1856, built that illusion. She learned from a father who waved dubious parchments to claim noble blood, lied her way into marriage with Frederic Humbert, son of a future Minister of Justice, and kept her husband as a partner even after the lie came out.

In 1879 she began telling of an American millionaire, Robert Henry Crawford, whose life she saved on a train, and in 1881 announced he had left her everything. Two invented nephews with a rival will supplied the reason the safe could never be opened. She borrowed against it, entertained Marcel Proust and a future president, and sued her phantom rivals up to the highest court in France. The episode follows the collapse, the flight to Madrid, and the ordinary people left to pay.

• As a girl, Therese persuaded her friends to pool their jewelry and take turns wearing it to pass as wealthy.
• Two of her brothers appeared in court as the Crawford nephews, and each ruling made bankers more certain the fortune existed.
• After a bank official checked the registers and found no bonds in her name, she raised fresh cash from shopkeepers, farmers, and servants by selling life annuities.
• Henri Matisse's in-laws were swept up because his mother-in-law was the Humberts' housekeeper. Detectives raided his studio and his father-in-law went on hunger strike in custody.
• Arrested in Madrid in December 1902, Therese and Frederic got five years of hard labor. A 1930 article by her prosecutor placed her alive in Paris, not dead in Chicago in 1918.

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In 1983 Bernard Ebbers and three partners sketched a company in a motel coffee shop in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Fifteen years later it completed what was then the largest corporate merger in United States history. This episode traces how Long Distance Discount Services became WorldCom by buying more than 60 telecommunications firms, outbidding AT&T and Sprint for Advanced Telecommunications in 1992 and taking MCI for 37 billion dollars in 1998. Growth by acquisition made Ebbers a titan and left a tangle of billing systems and debt underneath.

The machine stopped when regulators blocked a 129 billion dollar merger with Sprint, just as the dot-com bubble burst. Ebbers had borrowed heavily against his own shares to buy ranches, timberland, and a yacht builder, and the board lent him 408.2 million dollars so he would not have to sell. Then the books were changed. Line costs became capital assets, revenue was invented, and the lie grew to 11 billion dollars until an internal audit team working nights pulled it apart.

• WorldCom booked everyday interconnection fees as capital expenditures, the equivalent of recording an electric bill as a home renovation.
• Internal auditor Cynthia Cooper and her associate Gene Morse found an initial 3.8 billion dollars in fraudulent entries in June 2002 despite pushback from CFO Scott Sullivan, and took it to the audit committee.
• The outside auditor was Arthur Andersen, convicted over Enron just days before the WorldCom fraud surfaced.
• WorldCom filed for Chapter 11 on July 21, 2002, then the largest bankruptcy in US history. It paid a 2.25 billion dollar SEC penalty, became MCI again, and was bought by Verizon in 2006.
• Ebbers was convicted on March 15, 2005 and sentenced to 25 years. He served 13, was released in late 2019, and died in February 2020.

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Charles Van Doren was a Columbia University English professor from a family of Pulitzer Prize winning writers. In November 1959 he sat before Congress on national television and confessed to being the face of the biggest fraud in early broadcasting. This episode explains how he got there. A 1954 Supreme Court ruling let networks hand out large cash prizes, and NBC launched Twenty-One in September 1956. The first honest episode was a disaster of sweating contestants and dead air, sponsor Geritol was furious, and the producers decided to script the show.

Producer Dan Enright wanted a hero, and reigning champion Herb Stempel did not fit the part. Van Doren, who had auditioned for Tic-Tac-Dough, did. Stempel was ordered to lose on December 5, 1956, and his resentment began the unraveling that a grand jury and a House subcommittee finished. The episode follows Van Doren from adored celebrity to decades of silence, and shows how his ruin rewrote the law and changed who controls television programming.

• Stempel, who had won 69,500 dollars, was told to miss a question about the 1955 Best Picture Oscar by answering On the Waterfront instead of Marty, one of his favorite films.
• Contestant James Snodgrass mailed himself the questions and answers by registered mail before his episodes aired, supplying the postmarked proof Stempel lacked.
• Rigging a quiz show was not yet illegal, so the real legal danger for contestants was perjury before the New York grand jury in 1958.
• Van Doren lost his job on the Today show, resigned from Columbia, worked as an editor at Encyclopedia Britannica until 1982, and refused 100,000 dollars to consult on the 1994 film Quiz Show.
• In 1960 President Eisenhower signed an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 that made fixing televised contests of knowledge illegal.

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A banknote with a face value of 100 quintillion, a one followed by 20 zeros, could buy about 20 US cents of goods. That was the Hungarian pengo in 1946, the most extreme hyperinflation on record. This episode follows the currency from birth to death. It was introduced on January 1, 1927 with a League of Nations loan, replacing the ruined korona at 12,500 to one, and its name was chosen to evoke the ring of silver coins on a wooden table. Pegged to gold and backed by reserves that reached 51 percent by 1930, it was the most stable currency in its region.

World War II turned the national bank into a printing press. Silver coins gave way to aluminum, steel, and zinc, and the presses were evacuated to Veszprem and kept running. After the war, with no tax base and reparations due, the government used inflation as a hidden tax until prices doubled about every 15 hours. The episode explains the milpengo and bilpengo, the indexed tax pengo that killed the original currency, and the day the forint wiped away 29 zeros.

• The central bank weighed names including Turul, Turan, Libertas, and Marias before settling on the sound of silver.
• With no time to engrave new plates, the Treasury reused Endre Horvath's prewar designs with different ink colors and new text. A one sextillion note was printed but never issued.
• Banknotes from 1945 spelled out their value in six languages, a trace of territories Hungary had lost after World War I.
• The adopengo began on January 1, 1946 equal to one pengo. By July 31 one adopengo equaled two sextillion.
• On August 1, 1946 one forint cost 400 octillion pengo, and all the pengo in circulation was worth a fraction of a single filler.

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The email from a foreign prince offering 20 million dollars looks like a joke, yet advance fee fraud takes in billions every year. This episode traces its lineage to the Spanish Prisoner letters of the late 18th century and the Letter from Jerusalem documented by Vidocq in the 1830s, then to Nigeria in the 1980s and 90s, where an oil price crash, youth unemployment, and cyber cafes produced the Yahoo Boys. The name comes from Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, though the senders may now sit in Amsterdam, Spain, South Africa, or Jamaica.

The central insight comes from Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley: the bad grammar is a filter. Sending ten million emails costs nothing, but grooming a reply takes hours, so absurd messages repel skeptics and leave only the most susceptible. From there the episode follows the money through Western Union and cryptocurrency mixers, the invented fees that trigger the sunk cost fallacy, and the newer bait of puppies, romance, jobs, and phone towers. It ends with the people who embezzled, were kidnapped, or were killed.

• Scammers abused the Telecommunications Relay Service for deaf callers, whose operators were legally bound to read fraudulent scripts verbatim without warning the victim.
• In the fake check scam, a victim deposits a forged cashier's check for 5,000 dollars, wires 4,000 onward, and is left liable when the bank reverses the deposit.
• The FBI reported more than 3.5 billion dollars in losses to advance fee and romance scams in a single year, and a UK report put the average victim's loss around 31,000 pounds.
• A former county treasurer in Michigan embezzled public funds to keep paying fees and was sentenced to between nine and 14 years in prison.
• Jette Jacobs, a 67 year old Australian who had sent more than 90,000 dollars to a supposed fiance, was found dead two days after arriving in South Africa in 2013.

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Charles Ingram admitted on national television that he did not know what a googol was, chose it anyway, and won one million pounds on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. No champagne followed, only a criminal investigation. This episode looks at the man in the hot seat: born in Derbyshire in 1963, son of an RAF wing commander, a Sandhurst graduate who became a major in the Royal Engineers and served a UN tour in Bosnia. His wife Diana and her brother had each already won 32,000 pounds on the show, and he trained daily on a homemade fastest finger machine.

After a dismal first day that left him at 4,000 pounds with one lifeline, Ingram returned and began reversing himself on answer after answer, from Craig David to Baron Haussmann's Paris. Producers at Celador withheld the prize and found coughs from waiting contestant Tecwen Whittock on the tapes. The episode weighs both readings of the 2003 trial at Southwark Crown Court, a planned heist or confirmation bias in an editing suite, and follows Ingram's fall into reality television and a second fraud conviction.

• Producers searched Ingram's hair, clothes, and shoes for devices after the win and found nothing.
• Prosecutors said 19 of the 192 coughs recorded that night came from Whittock at telling moments, relying on audio that had been isolated and amplified.
• Host Chris Tarrant, sitting three feet away, testified that he heard no coughing, and chess grandmaster James Plaskett argued the coughs were unconscious releases of tension.
• Police found a handwritten general knowledge book in Whittock's home containing the Holbein answer to one of Ingram's questions.
• All three were convicted on April 7, 2003. The Ingrams received 18 month suspended sentences, and the army forced Charles to resign his commission after 16 years.

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In the summer of 1897 the ships Excelsior and Portland docked with holds full of raw gold, and Seattle's streetcar drivers, policemen, and even its mayor walked off the job. This episode separates the romantic myth of the Klondike from what the journey really demanded. The find itself came on August 16, 1896 at Rabbit Creek, made by George Carmack, Skookum Jim, and Tagish Charley, with the claim filed in Carmack's name because an Indigenous man's claim might not have been honored. The stampede followed because the panics of 1893 and 1896 had left the world starved for gold.

About 100,000 people set out and only 30,000 to 40,000 arrived. The Mounties required each traveler to haul roughly a ton of supplies, which meant relaying 65 pound loads over the Chilkoot Pass or wading the mud of the White Pass, then building boats to run the Yukon River. Dawson City greeted them with typhoid, scurvy, staked claims, and frozen ground that had to be thawed with fire. The episode also covers the displaced Han people, the women who earned more from laundry than men did from mining, and the sudden exit to Nome.

• Moving a ton of gear 50 miles in relays meant walking about 2,500 miles, and Tlingit packers could charge up to a dollar a pound for the final ascent.
• The White Pass became known as the Dead Horse Trail, and an April 1898 avalanche on the Chilkoot Pass killed more than 60 people.
• Guidebook shortcuts proved deadly: of roughly 1,660 people who left from Edmonton only 685 survived, and one Malaspina Glacier expedition came back with four men.
• Dawson City grew from about 500 people to 17,000 in two years, and gambler Sam Bonnifield won a single 200,000 dollar poker pot with four kings.
• The stampeders together spent more getting to the Klondike than the value of all the gold taken out between 1897 and 1901.

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J. Paul Getty was the wealthiest private citizen on the planet, and he installed a coin-operated payphone in the hallway of his 72-room English mansion so guests could not run up his bill. This episode tries to reconcile the two men. It starts in Minneapolis in 1892 with strict Methodist parents, follows him to Berkeley and Oxford, and lands on the wound that shaped him: when his father died in 1930 leaving 10 million dollars, the scandal-prone Paul received only 500,000.

He answered by building something larger. During the Great Depression he bought up Pacific Western, Tidewater, and Skelly Oil for pennies on the dollar, then paid Ibn Saud 9.5 million dollars in cash for rights to the Saudi Arabian Neutral Zone and drilled dry holes for four years before striking oil in 1953. The same cold arithmetic governed his five marriages, his dying son, and the 1973 kidnapping of his grandson in Rome, where even a severed ear did not stop him from negotiating.

• Given 10,000 dollars by his father in 1914, Getty bought the Nancy Taylor No. 1 well in Oklahoma, struck oil in 1915, and made his first million soon after.
• Having studied Arabic, he negotiated directly with Ibn Saud. The Neutral Zone field produced 16 million barrels a year and made him the wealthiest living American by 1957.
• He scolded his fifth wife, Teddy Lynch, for spending too much on treatment for their son's brain tumor, and did not attend the boy's funeral when he died at 12.
• When kidnappers cut their demand from 17 million dollars to 3 million, Getty paid 2.2 million, the most he could deduct from his taxes, and lent his son the other 800,000 at 4 percent interest.
• He died in 1976 and left more than 661 million dollars to the J. Paul Getty Trust, which now runs the Getty Museum and Getty Villa in Los Angeles.