Mr Charming

A story for our times, Mr Charming is part crime thriller, part psychological profile and part financial scandal. It is also all true:

He was the scion of a wealthy German textiles empire and became an extravagantly successful day trader and respected film producer. But he was also the cruellest of fraudsters. Over a period of fourteen years Felix Vossen conned his best friends and his closest colleagues out of tens of millions of pounds. He did so by insinuating himself into their lives, promising them impossibly generous returns on their money, then methodically and systematically defrauding them. When he ran out of friends to defraud, he stole from his family.

In the company of his glamorous model girlfriend, Vossen recruited his prey by word of mouth and personal recommendation, researching his targets exhaustively - all the better to forge bonds of empathy and trust and to then betray them. He had smart offices in London and Zurich and a Midas-like ability to spot the rising stars of the stock market. But Felix Vossen was a pathological liar and his investment empire was built on a giant deceit - a Ponzi scheme using one investor's money to pay another.

Mr Charming charts the double life of Felix Vossen - his rise from restless teenager who quit school early to established figure on the London movie scene and investment guru controlling a GBP250 million fund. Drawing on interviews with victims, prosecutors, police, lawyers and forensic accountants, it details how Vossen carried out his scam and how he was able to get away with it for so long. When the Ponzi scheme finally collapsed it captures the drama of the international manhunt as Vossen flees London and went on the run. Why did Vossen's victims put their money into something that was too good to be true? Why did Vossen's banks turned a blind eye to his fraudulent activity and how did financial watchdogs fail to spot this rogue trader?