Maybe "Ponzi scheme" should have its own spot in the Dewey Decimal System. Along with biographies of the schemers, a growing stack of scholarly references, legal tomes and articles aims to collect knowledge about this age-old crime.

But the latest entry in the category, "The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle: A History and Analysis of Con Artists and Victims" by Tamar Frankel, takes a different approach. While Professor Frankel is a legal scholar who has been on the faculty of the Boston University Law School since 1968, her book explores the psychology of the financial criminals and what makes them tick. She was inspired by a colleague who referred to them as "those mimics of trustworthiness: con artists."

She spent more than a decade researching the book, analyzing more than a hundred Ponzi schemes. Among them: the Caritas scandal in Romania, an early 1990s fraud whose victims saw the mastermind as a saint in Robin Hood guise; the currency fraud run by J. David Dominelli, which collapsed in the mid-1980s and stung a host of San Diego's elite; and the Madoff scandal, history's largest Ponzi scheme, with paper losses of $64.8 billion and thousands of victims around the world.

Professor Frankel talked about the mind-set of the con artist, as well as the role that victims and society play. Her conclusions will not comfort Ponzi victims; she faults them for their gullibility and failing to "do their homework." She finds, too, that society has a profound ambivalence toward con artists despite the vicious nature of their crimes - which, she notes, on rare occasions have even included murder.

David Fuller's view There will always be Ponzi schemes but fortunately they are few in number. They are exceptionally difficult to spot because their perpetrators are wickedly clever. Also, we need to trust people and would be miserable if we did not. The best way to avoid Ponzi schemes and more importantly lessen the risk from any type of fraud, is to conduct our own due diligence and not put all our eggs in one basket.