Hello from Istanbul! I am unbelievably useless at sleeping on planes, so by the time you're reading this I will hopefully be taking a quick nap in a hotel room. After that, it's time to go explore a city of immense historical importance. There are apparently cats everywhere as well, so it sounds like my kind of Venn diagram.

Ever heard the term “lighten up on the carbs”? Well, consider the following story a very practical application thereof.

In a bizarre social media moment that has since gone viral, TikTok user @froginahatgirl discovered that the croissant-shaped lamp she bought from Chinese discount leviathan Temu wasn’t just a clever design - it was an actual croissant covered in resin.

After noticing ants swarming under the lamp, she decided to investigate further. She noticed a small hole on the side of the lamp, and upon shaking it, saw a handful of crumbs fall through. As she broke the lamp in half, her suspicions were confirmed: inside were layers of crumbling pastry surrounding a lightbulb. She then went a step further than you or I probably would and tasted a piece of the pastry, thereby confirming once and for all that it was, in fact, food.

The video, which has already racked up over 13.5 million views, sparked a mix of shock and amusement, with many questioning what exactly is going on inside Temu’s factories. “Be right back - have to go check on my Temu cat lamp real quick!” read one comment.

The bedside pastry is unlikely to be the next big thing. Certainly, it won't gain the acceptance we've seen on the most common wardrobe item of all: a pair of jeans. Levi Strauss has built its brand around taking the credit for inventing this product. That's not quite true, as Dominique Olivier explores in her fantastic column this week. Read it here>>>

Read on for a scammer who became a podcaster and a set of Fast Facts themed around accidential inventions.

Most of all - have a magnificent Sunday!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

TL;DR: Is Steve Comisar a master of self-reinvention, or just a really good scam artist?

In the early 1990s, fledgling conman Steve Comisar ran ads in various US publications for “Solar Powered Clothes Dryers” for $49.95. His promise was that the product would dry clothes using a “scientifically proven, space age method incorporating only the power of the sun”. When his customers received their orders, however, they were surprised with ordinary clotheslines, which could be purchased in practically any grocery store for $5 or less.

Naturally, not everybody who got caught was amused by Steve’s clever con, and while a few grumpy customers tried to band together to sue him, they ultimately didn’t have a leg to stand on. Why? Because his ad wasn’t lying: clotheslines had been drying laundry in the sun since time immemorial. They are solar powered by their very definition.

This wasn’t Steve’s first brush with trouble either. He had previously been caught and arrested for a scheme related to diet pills (read: regular aspirin coated in caffeine) in 1983. While serving a jail sentence for telemarketing fraud in 1994, Steve decided what he really needed was a rebrand and better PR. He used the downtime during his incarceration to write a book, “America's Guide to Fraud Prevention”, under the pen name Brett Champion. As Brett Champion, Comisar positioned himself as an ex-fraudster-turned-straight who wanted to make right by educating Joe Public about the tricks that conmen use to fool them.

The American public lapped up Comisar/Champion’s story, and his book became a bestseller. In no time he was appearing as a fraud prevention expert and consultant on Dateline NBC, The View, Sally, Leeza and Crook & Chase, to name a few. While Comisar swore high and low that he was retired from crime and completely reformed, he was running scams the entire time. Are any of us surprised?

In 1999, Steve was sent back to jail after he got caught soliciting investments for a non-existent TV show. He managed to swindle one retired engineer out of $100,000 with that one. Even that wasn’t enough to stop him: he was eventually caught running a mail fraud scheme from prison. That one bought him a few more years in overalls before he was eventually released in 2018.

Where will you find Steve these days? Look no further than Apple podcasts, where he hosts a show called “Scam Junkie”. The introduction for his show reads as follows: “Scam Junkie is a true crime podcast like no other. Hosted by Steve Comisar, aka Brett Champion, The Don of Con, you will learn the secrets of scamming, cultivated from The Don’s 25 year career as a legendary conman, making him millions of dollars and cementing his place as one of the most prolific conmen of all time.”

So it seems like Comisar/Brett Champion/The Don is right back to his old tricks, either scamming for a living or talking about scamming for a living.

Grifters gonna grift.

An assortment of facts that will take you only a minute to read.

• When a New York restaurant customer complained about his fried potatoes being too soggy and thick, Chef George Crum got so upset that he cut the potatoes into extremely thin slices, fried them until they were ultra crispy and sprinkled on some salt. Enter one of the world’s most popular snacks – potato chips.

• ​While stirring a pot of chemicals in 1826, pharmacist John Walker pulled his wooden stir stick out of the pot and tried to wipe the glob of chemicals that was stuck to it on the table. Instead of wiping off, the chemicals ignited. As a result, matches were born.

• An engineer at Raytheon, Percy Spencer, was experimenting with a radar-related vacuum tube when he noticed the candy bar in his pocket was melting. Using his newfound knowledge, he later patented the microwave.

• Naval engineer Richard James was trying to develop a spring that would support and stabilise sensitive equipment on ships. While he was working on his project, one of the springs fell off a shelf and walked itself across his floor. As James watched the spring continue to move, he realised it would make a great toy. His wife came up with the name, and the first Slinky was sold in late 1945.

• The year was 1928, and scientist Alexander Flemming was in a rush to go on vacation. He subsequently left his lab a mess, leaving behind several petri dishes with bacteria in them. When he got back from vacation two weeks later, some of the petri dishes were mouldy. While cleaning the mould, he noticed that one particular substance, penicillin, had killed the bacteria in the petri dish it grew in. Since then, the antibiotic penicillin has been used to save millions of people every year.