Lords of Scam is another true crime documentary from Netflix, only this time the crime was in the abstract: hundreds of millions of Euros skimmed from financial loopholes in the EU’s Emissions Trading System. A bunch of French guys lived on their ill-gotten profits until the bickering began, the cops came snooping, and the murders started happening. Beginning in 2008, a group of French hustlers, business owners, and big money financiers embarked on a scheme to fleece the hundreds of millions of Euros derived from the Value Added Tax (VAT) applied on transactions within the European Union Emissions Trading System, they became fabulously wealthy overnight. Asked about his role in the scheme, a few years into his eight-year prison time, Mardouche Marco gesticulates wildly and simply say he was a fifth wheel, by no means a mastermind. He was the face man for a den of carbon tax thieves operating on a global scale. Lords of Scam interviews Marco extensively as he races sports cars and holds court about town, all under the conditions of his work-release program. We also meet friends and co-conspirators, people like Greg Zaoui and Dominique Ghez, who’ll call Marco their BFF as quickly as they deride him. The activities of another accomplice, wealthy financier Arnaud Mimran, are described from a distance, since he’s also doing time, and the mechanics of the group’s scheme are explained as their timeline of deceit.

– Compilation