Funding Source: National Science Foundation (NSF), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow / National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) International and Area Studies, and Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-Ph.D. Research Grant – What does fraud—as a political, legal, and moral category—reveal about the conditions of social, political, and economic life in the early 21st century? This project pivots around the moral economies and governance politics of estafa (fraud) in the conjoined cities of El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia. Fraud accusations sit at the intersection of donor-backed development projects and dubious pyramid schemes, transnational judicial reform efforts, and everyday livelihood strategies in places like Bolivia, as foreign donors and national governments emphasize entrepreneurship as the means to alleviate poverty and seek to promote the rule of law. This project will illuminate the shifting relationship between desire, entrepreneurship, virtuous citizenship, and the criminalization of insolvent subjects—with implications for understanding fraud’s significance beyond the Bolivian context. This project involves sustained ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with aggrieved pyramid scheme participants, shopkeepers, and salespeople in Bolivia’s many multilevel marketing companies, as well as with state regulators, foreign donors, and members of the criminal justice system.