Mitchell Zuckoff Quotes

My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.

Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money; it's the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common.

My favorite pre-Ponzi schemer was known as '520 Percent Miller' because he promised 10 percent returns a week, or 520 percent a year. Of course he was just using new investors' money to pay old investors, and soon he was on the lam.

My opinion is that he's a swindler and you're a sucker.

It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.

In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.

I'm the type of guy who'd sell you a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

Just like my Uncle Charlie used to say, just before he sprung the trap: He said, "You can't cheat and honest man! Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump!

As I've said before, free money scams are a problem.

I had a weird situation were someone used my name to extort money from a woman. He took her for 60 or 80 thousand dollars. He is in prison now. It was on Sally.

The con movie is a little bit different where maybe we tell you what we're going to do but it never goes down the way you expect because there's so much double-crossing and cheats and lies going on along the whole way.

A successful swindler has to be a great salesman even more than a great actor.

There's a lot of conning as part of our society, I think.

There is no real difference between a set of bank directors, who make and issue notes … which they deliberately promise to pay with a previous resolution not to pay, and a gang of fair, open, honest, counterfeiters.

A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the bottom.

This was a massive Ponzi scheme and the biggest crime against the American economy in our lifetimes—in fact, ever…. You had various traders buying each other’s products to artificially keep the prices up so that the bubble didn’t collapse.

I'm a blagger by trade.

Now, a lot of people didn't know him at all - it went through feeder funds, so they wouldn't even have known anything about Bernie Madoff. But everybody finds a justification for their behavior, and obviously, Bernie had a half dozen justifications in his own mind.

One of the things about the con artist lifestyle is that all the romance is sort of sloppy and fast and loose.

I know every trick in the book, in terms of schemes and fraud.

For the grifter, ripping people off is seldom the point. The grifter is an artiste who invests in the long con.

With commerce comes fraud.

People have been upset in the past about pay-per-view fights because they got sold a lie or an illusion that was not real.