Pocket Gears

Case files · Follow the bag

Madoff ran it for decades. Rita Crundwell took $53.7 million from her town. Here's the one slip that caught each of them.

Caught is twelve real money crimes, from Charles Ponzi in 1920 to FTX in 2022, told the way our videos tell them. Every chapter ends with the exact mistake that brought it down.

Buy all 12 cases$9

$9 plus local tax. Instant 39 page PDF. Secure Stripe checkout. All sales are final.

First edition, sources checked November 15, 2026. At checkout: Add Follow the Fine, where 12 bank fines went, for $17.

"How did they even get caught?"

Bank of 'America' was just fined 1.3 billion...and not a single arrest.

That's a real comment from under one of our videos, and a version of it shows up under every money crime episode we make. The anger is fair. But hiding in those comments is a second question that almost never gets a proper answer: when somebody does go down, how did it actually happen?

The answer is nearly always smaller than the crime. Not a genius detective. A city clerk filling in for a boss on vacation. An IRS agent googling at night. A bank that thought a charity should know how to spell "foundation".

So we took twelve of the most famous money crimes there are and told each one to the moment it cracked. Real people, real courts, every chapter with its sources. And at the end of each, a box called The Slip.

Free case: how one afternoon of math caught Charles Ponzi

Boston, 1920. Ponzi promised 50% profit in 45 days, from buying international postal reply coupons cheap abroad and cashing them in the US. Lines went around the block. Here's the move that ended it, straight from Chapter 01.

What Ponzi's story neededCoupons to cover the money he'd taken inAbout 160 millionSo the profit could be real
What existedCoupons circulating in the whole United StatesAbout 27,000Roughly 5,900 needed for every real one
The SlipHe promised a return so high that one afternoon of arithmetic broke it. Ponzi never needed to be exposed by an insider. He needed someone to count the coupons.

Try it yourself: 50% every 45 days is about eight rounds a year. $100 becomes $150, then $225, then $338, and after eight rounds about $2,563. If a promised return makes the yearly number absurd, you've just done the financial writer Clarence Barron's job.

That's one case. The other eleven slips are in the book, and they come in only three kinds.

Slip 1The mathThe promise couldn't be true, and someone multiplied it out.Ponzi, Madoff, Stanford, FTX
Slip 2The booksSomeone whose job was the paperwork read the right page.Capone, WorldCom, Crundwell, Wirecard
Slip 3The trailA tiny detail had a real name on it.Silk Road, Bangladesh Bank, Theranos, Bitfinex

What's inside

39 pages. Twelve case chapters in three parts, one part for each kind of slip, plus a scoreboard and a printable card.

  1. 00How do people actually get caught?p. 3
  2. Part one: The math didn't work
  3. 01Charles Ponzi, 1920. How did the man who named the scheme get caught?p. 7
  4. 02Bernard Madoff, 2008. Why did the biggest Ponzi scheme end with a family meeting?p. 9
  5. 03Allen Stanford, 2009. How do you lose $7 billion with a bank on a Caribbean island?p. 11
  6. 04Sam Bankman-Fried, 2022. How did one leaked balance sheet end FTX in nine days?p. 13
  7. Part two: Somebody opened the books
  8. 05Al Capone, 1931. Why did Al Capone go to prison for taxes?p. 16
  9. 06WorldCom, 2002. How did an internal auditor find $3.8 billion working at night?p. 18
  10. 07Rita Crundwell, 2012. How did a small town's bookkeeper take $53.7 million?p. 20
  11. 08Wirecard, 2020. How did $2 billion disappear from a German stock market star?p. 22
  12. Part three: The trail had a name on it
  13. 09Ross Ulbricht, 2013. How did an IRS agent find Silk Road's boss with a Google search?p. 25
  14. 10The Bangladesh Bank heist, 2016. How did one spelling mistake save $20 million?p. 27
  15. 11Elizabeth Holmes, 2015. How did two junior employees take down a $9 billion company?p. 29
  16. 12Lichtenstein and Morgan, 2022. How do you get caught with $3.6 billion of stolen bitcoin?p. 31
  17. The back of the book
  18. 13The scoreboard: who caught whomp. 33
  19. 14The Slip Card, a printable page of nine warning signsp. 34
  20. 15Glossary of every money word in the bookp. 35
  21. 16Read the full stories: six books behind these casesp. 36
12case files, each with a dated bust timeline and The Slip
102years of money crime, from 1920 to 2022
7"do the math" boxes where a number broke the scheme
Buy all 12 cases$9

$9 plus local tax. Instant 39 page PDF. Secure Stripe checkout. All sales are final.

Flip through some pages

The cover of Caught with Nico and two characters in the town square
The cover
The three kinds of slip and the five beats of every bust
The three slips, and the five beats of every bust
Part two opener, an illustration of tied case files
Part two: Somebody opened the books
Chapter 01 opener with the Ponzi case file card
Chapter 01: the case file and the moment
A case page with a dated bust timeline and a do the math box
How it came apart, as a timeline
The scoreboard table of all twelve cases
The scoreboard: who caught whom

Who made this

Nico of Pocket Gears

Hey, it's Nico, the voice of Pocket Gears. Our whole channel runs on one idea: money systems aren't secret, they're just never explained. Crime is the same. A Ponzi scheme isn't magic. It's a promise that can't be true, and somebody eventually does the math.

For this book we built twelve cases from court records, SEC and Justice Department releases, inspector general reports, and the books and newspapers that broke them. Every chapter lists its sources at the back. Where a court hasn't ruled yet, like the Wirecard trial in Munich, the book says so.

What it won't do: explain how to run any scheme, or tell you what to do with your money. Court-level facts and the bust, that's it.

Questions

Is it a how-to?

No. Each case covers what the courts and regulators found, then how it came apart. You'll finish knowing how people get caught, not how to do anything.

Are these stories true?

All twelve are real cases with real court records. Every chapter's sources are listed by name at the back, so you can look any of them up.

I've seen videos on Madoff and FTX. What's new here?

Most videos stop at the scheme. Each chapter here spends its time on the bust: a dated timeline of how it cracked, who noticed, and the one slip, plus where the money went after.

How do I get it, and can I read it on my phone?

You download the PDF right after paying. Pages are sized for a phone or tablet screen, and the Slip Card prints on one page.

Refunds?

All sales are final. This is a digital download you get right away, so we don't offer refunds. This doesn't affect any rights you have by law. The free Ponzi case, the full contents and the inside pages are here so you can check before buying.

Twelve crimes. Twelve slips. One afternoon of reading.

Buy all 12 cases$9

$9 plus local tax. Instant 39 page PDF. Secure Stripe checkout. All sales are final.

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