14. Bre-X Minerals
Year: 1997
Approx. Amount: $4.4 Billion*
Company / Person Involved: Bre-X Minerals
When a mining company claims to have found a gold reserve totaling more than 200 million ounces of gold, it’s only natural for investors to begin salivating at the mouth a little. After all, the company’s stock price rose from the 10s to a high of, a split-adjusted, $280 and reached a market cap of just shy of $4.5 billion. And then everything came crashing down.
Bre-X Minerals @EnQueInvertir / Twitter.com
None of it was real. Well, the company was, it was just the gold that wasn’t, or most of it, at least. Further tests showed that the core samples that Bre-X provided were salted with gold, not made of gold, thus unraveling not only one of Canada’s biggest stock scandals but one of the country’s biggest scams altogether.