Imagine you’re an investor reading a company’s glossy annual report. Sales are soaring, profits are up, and the future looks bright. But what if those numbers were carefully twisted to fool you? Financial statement misrepresentation is the practice of making a company look much stronger than it really is — sometimes it bends the rules, sometimes it breaks them. In this chapter, we’ll look at the most common tricks used to distort the numbers, so you can spot the warning signs before the whole illusion collapses.