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Buried Ledger

by Buried Ledger

History Documentary

Season 1

Buried Ledger — The Telecom That Called Itself Profitable

WorldCom disguised eleven billion dollars in ordinary expenses as long-term investment, until its own internal auditor pursued the discrepancy against her bosses' wishes.

Buried Ledger — The Milk Company That Invented Its Own Bank Account

Parmalat kept a fictional four-billion-dollar bank account on its books for years, backed by a crudely forged document no one checked directly with the bank until it was too late.

Buried Ledger — The Fund That Moved a Nation's Money

1MDB was supposed to develop Malaysia's economy. Billions of it instead funded real estate, jewelry, and reportedly a Hollywood film about financial fraud.

Buried Ledger — The Software That Knew When It Was Being Tested

Volkswagen's defeat device software could recognize an emissions test in progress and change how the engine behaved, only during the test. Eleven million vehicles carried it.

Buried Ledger — The Number Every Loan on Earth Was Built On

LIBOR set the cost of over three hundred trillion dollars in financial contracts worldwide, calculated from bank self-reports that traders were quietly manipulating for years.

Buried Ledger — The Rogue Trader Who Sank a 233-Year-Old Bank

Nick Leeson controlled both the trading and the settlement books in Barings' Singapore office. Hidden losses in one secret account eventually destroyed the bank.

Buried Ledger — The Exchange That Traded With Itself

FTX quietly funneled customer deposits into a sister trading firm. When a bank run hit in November 2022, an eight-billion-dollar hole opened in ten days.

Buried Ledger — The Blood Test That Never Worked

Theranos promised to run hundreds of tests from a finger-prick of blood. It couldn't, and the gap between the claim and the technology took years, and a criminal trial, to fully surface.

Buried Ledger — The Cash That Was Never There

Wirecard's auditors couldn't confirm 1.9 billion euros the company claimed to hold in the Philippines, because it never existed. The COO vanished; he has never been found.

Buried Ledger — The Ponzi King of Manhattan

Bernie Madoff ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history behind a wall of Wall Street respectability, until the 2008 crisis forced a wave of withdrawals the fund could never cover.

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