Nicholas Cosmo

The financial crisis has exposed yet more Ponzi-style wonkiness in the form of Nicholas Cosmo, who was arrested yesterday after an alleged $380m mail fraud scheme. Just last week I was noting how every few days brings another worm out of the woodwork, and now Cosmo is making me think I should just change the whole blog to charting fraudsters.

Cosmo was head of Agape World Inc, a bridge-loan company that “works with you and your potential project to help raise assets to meet approval for traditional lending at a later date”. Anything with “later date” in it, especially coming from someone who did jail time for misappropriating funds as a stockbroker, and who has had “extensive gambling therapy”, should start the alarm bells ringing. And bells did ring on this messageboard, where people discuss the flimsiness of Agape, played out over the last few months of delayed loan payments and wheels falling off. After thousands of investors pulled their money out post-crisis, there presumably wasn’t enough to keep the scheme inflated, and so it collapsed.

Cosmo “voluntarily surrendered” to the authorities at the train station, which proves that the train, North By Northwest not withstanding, is not a good getaway method thanks to the waiting around involved. Better yet, the arrest was in Hicksville, NY, which I thought was just shorthand for a town full of tumbleweeds and people with webbed feet, but it turns out it’s an actual place.

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