What MATERIUM is and who is behind it

MATERIUM is a free documentary series on YouTube, produced by Nanis TV, that tells the true stories of the biggest scams in history so you can learn to recognize them before you fall for one. Its first season has 16 episodes of about 18 minutes each, from the Eiffel Tower sold as scrap metal in 1925 to the collapse of FTX in 2022, and it's published in four languages, English, Spanish, German and French, each with its own channel.

What is MATERIUM about?

It tells real scams: documented, with names and dates. Every story in the first season is about money: Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, fake cryptocurrencies, accounting fraud, rigged stock markets and startups that had no product. Some cases date back to the 19th century, like Baldomera Larra's “Caja de Imposiciones” in 1876 Madrid, and some are still in the courts.

Each episode does two things at once. The first is to tell a story well: who the con artist was, how the deception was built, who believed it and how it fell apart. The second is the one we care about most: taking the mechanism apart so you can see it coming in your own life. That's why every episode ends with a Law of Deception, a single sentence that sums up the trap. The first one, Victor Lustig's, says that “the victim's greed does the con man's work.” All sixteen make up a playbook you can read in The Laws of Deception.

The core idea fits in one line, and it's the series' signature: there's no such thing as a new scam. Same scam. New disguise.

Who is behind the series?

MATERIUM is produced by Nanis TV, a studio of documentary channels on YouTube. Every episode is built on documented sources, and the articles on this site list theirs at the end.

We're not financial advisers, lawyers or a victims' association. We're explainers. The series doesn't ask for money, doesn't sell investment products and doesn't offer to recover what anyone has lost. If someone ever contacts you on behalf of MATERIUM asking for a payment, it's a scam.

How we document each case, which sources we use and how we correct a mistake is explained in detail in how we research.

What are the five Houses?

MATERIUM's visual world doesn't use actors or recreated real faces. Its characters are faceless mannequins, figures made of five materials. Each material is a House, and each House stands for a role that repeats in every scam in history:

• Iron: the law. Police officers, judges, prosecutors, inspectors. The force that arrives sooner or later, and sometimes too late.
• Gold: power. Bankers, aristocrats, millionaires, the stock exchange. The money everyone chases and the prestige that serves as cover.
• Clay: the con artists. Malleable, they change shape in every story. They're always the main character and never what they seem.
• Copper: the victims. Ordinary people: savers, families, workers. The ones who pay the bill.
• Crystal: technology. Science, machines, screens and cryptocurrencies. The most modern disguise for the same trap.

The faceless figures are a deliberate choice. Victims aren't put on display, living people aren't caricatured, and the viewer sees the mechanism, not the gore. When a face is needed, we use the person's real archival photo, credited to its source.

Why four languages and four channels?

The great scams don't carry a passport. Ponzi's scheme in 1920 Boston and a crypto pyramid circulating on WhatsApp today work the same way in New York, London, Madrid, Berlin or Paris. That's why the series is produced in four languages and each one has its own YouTube channel, with native narration: they aren't dubbed audio tracks on a single video.

The English channel is @MATERIUM_EN. New episodes premiere on Tuesdays and Fridays, and you can watch them all, in order, on the episodes page.

How do we use artificial intelligence and real archives?

Openly. Three kinds of images coexist in MATERIUM, and they're always kept apart:

1. The figures of the five Houses, animated with artificial intelligence tools. They're the visual language of the series and aren't meant to look like anyone.
2. Real archives: photographs, court documents, checks, period newspapers. They carry the “REAL ARCHIVE · MATERIUM” stamp and a credit with the source and license.
3. Reenactments: documents or scenes of which no image survives, especially in older cases. They're rebuilt with AI from what the sources describe, and they always carry the “REENACTMENT” stamp. A reenactment is never presented as archival material.

On top of that, every video is uploaded to YouTube with the altered or synthetic content label turned on, as the platform requires. We do it because a documentary about deception can't deceive, and because YouTube is filling up with fake AI-generated documentaries with no sources or labels, as the Belgian public broadcaster RTBF has reported.

Where do I start?

At the beginning. The first episode tells how Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower to a scrap dealer in 1925: you can watch it here or read the case and its sources in Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower. If what you want is to find out whether something you're being offered is a scam, go straight to how to spot a scam.