Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

by Tom Wright

An idea had taken shape in Low’s mind. Perhaps, he wondered, it was possible to take hundreds of millions of dollars in broad daylight, fooling Western banks and regulators.

At that moment, in late 2009, Low had access to more liquid cash than almost anyone on earth—and he wasn’t shy about spending it.

His was a scheme for the twenty-first century, a truly global endeavor that produced nothing—a shift of cash from a poorly controlled state fund in the developing world, diverting it into the opaque corners of an underpoliced financial system that’s all but broken.

There was one person, though, who didn’t need to comb through 1MDB’s financials to sense a fraud. And that person was Jordan Belfort.

Then there was the scale: The 1MDB affair was shaping up as the single largest financial scam of all time.