Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper

A man-bites-dog, true crime comedy caper that's 100% nonfiction...

Fraud costs Americans over a trillion dollars per year. So in Sin City, we made fraud prevention into an extreme sport.

Las Vegas, founded on the idea of getting people to not think about the long-term consequences of their actions, seems like the last place anyone would go to study history and sustainability. But look closer. Las Vegas is also the City of Second Chances, the surrounding Mojave Desert a land of mirages. Here the line separating reality and fantasy gets blurred. So do the lines separating graduate school, entrepreneurship, journalism, and fraud.

When I first went local, enrolling at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I made new friends - and a few enemies. Among them: a young British tycoon who bought Mike Tyson’s mansion, poker players and golf hustlers, FBI agents and ex-cons, friendly neighborhood bounty hunters, and one charismatic frenemy: a young, clean energy technology entrepreneur named Xavier.

As The Strip seduces me, I uncover a complex maze of scams ranging from Photoshop forgeries, mortgage fraud, identity theft, and crowdfunding to hacking, hypnosis, and intellectual property theft. The schemes span from Sin City to the Rocky Mountains, China, and into the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s best-known clean energy nonprofit. As privacy disappears in the 21^st century, turnabout is fair play. The hunter becomes the hunted. In Sin City, you can be whoever you want to be – but you have to pay the consequences. What is the ultimate Vegas rush: pulling off a multimillion-dollar con job – or blowing one up?