Spot the Cooked Books

What this book teaches

Every few years a company "everyone trusted" turns out to have been cooking its numbers. Every time, the tells were sitting in the accounts for anyone who knew what to look at, in what order, and why. This book walks through ten of them — Enron, Wirecard, Luckin, WorldCom, Madoff, Toshiba, Satyam, Waste Management, Tesco, Autonomy — and teaches you exactly the pattern each one broke. You'll follow one suspect company, Sudden Jump Inc., from its first suspiciously clean quarter to the moment the numbers stop adding up, and rehearse every red flag on live-feeling accounts until spotting them becomes second nature.

A red flag is a question, not a verdict. This is education on how to read a set of accounts for the patterns fraud tends to leave behind — not accounting, legal, or investment advice. Every odd number in this book is a reason to slow down and ask, never proof of wrongdoing on its own.