Sam Antar is a brilliant financial psychopath. In the 1980s, he masterminded the series of frauds that made the Antar family rich. The episode was the largest financial fraud in history through the 1980s–Crazy Eddie.
I like Sam, but don’t truly understand him. You see, I’m a nice guy, honest and trusting. Financial psychopaths are the opposite. Caring not for victims, they rob them blind. I could never do that. I have a conscience. Sam doesn’t.
Has Sam Antar become righteous? Probably not. You see, the medical literature concludes that once a psychopath, always a psychopath. And Sam was a proven and self-confessed financial psychopath. He would steal from anyone, without remorse. Stealing was his life.
So now he is my friend, and I like him a lot. Let’s not talk about trust.
Sam Antar was interviewed by Lauren Lyster on RT’s Capital Account. The interview extends from 4:50 through 23:09 of the following show.
You should watch this video. Sam’s first comment is, “I’m happy to report, as a retired member of the criminal underworld, that fraud is good. The fraud business is easy and fraud is getting easier.”
Could there be a Crazy Eddie type fraud today? He says, “It’s occurring right now. It’s occurring all over the place. Firms, with impunity, manipulate numbers. And, the SEC does nothing except–we caught you, fix your numbers, and go away.”
If Sam were in business today, he would find it child’s play to rob businesses and become filthy rich.
Along the way, he calls the recently passed Jobs Act the “Fraud made easy act.” He says, “I might even go back to my life of crime because of the JOBS Act–because it makes fraud too easy.”
He says that jail sentences do not deter fraudsters like him, because he thought he never would be caught. He thinks that jail sentences are necessary to hold crooks accountable.
Sam has this to day about financial audits performed by CPA firms, “The word audit itself is a fraudulent term. They’re limited compliance reviews of GAAP which may or may not catch book keeping errors. They’re not designed to catch fraud.”
He later adds,
In my day, I had to fool auditors–I had to lie to auditors in order to defraud my investors. Today you don’t have to lie to auditors–you don’t have to fool them. In many ways, they’re complicit with management. They’re in bed with management. They have this incestuous relationship with management, which makes crime easy. … they’ve gone from being duped–to being actual co-conspirators, in many cases…coconspirators to financial statement manipulation.
Sam Antar credits the fraud finding work of professors Ed Ketz and Tony Catanach on their blog, Grumpy Old Accountants.
To watch Sam Antar, view the segment from 4:50 through 23:09 of the following video.
Debit and credit – – David Albrecht
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