FRAUD
"ten vales divided is the ground"

This circle, contained multiple levels for various crimes. Inside of the circle were ten (10) "bolgias", or "pouches" where the sinners lay - all guilty of "fraud" of one sort or another. They may be liars, hypocrites, or thieves. "On the grim rocky ground [of the first bolgia], I saw horned devils armed with heavy whip Which on the sinners from behind they plied." These sinners were guilty of pandering, or "pimping", and as they beat their whores, they themselves would forever be beaten. 

1. In the next bolgia, "I saw people in such ordure drowned...[in] a very cesspool of excrement." These people were guilty of"flattery", or excessive and unreal praise of the Lord. Forever their mouths would be filled with human waste.
2. The third bolgia revealed the sinners upside down, buried beneath the earth, the bottoms of feet exposed to burning oil from the Heavens. For these sinners, eternal punishment was given for the fault of simony, selling religious items. 
3. The fourth bolgia greeted me with the sight of "Our human form so wrenched that tears, rained down out of the eyes, between the buttocks fell." How can someone rain down tears from their eyes, through their buttocks? They were forced to walk around in circles, head twisted backward so much so that their necks were permanently broken. This bolgia was reserved for the magicians and astrologers, who dared to speak "backwards" of God's designs.
4. What of the fifth bolgia? This was reserved for the barrators, ship's captains who had neglected their crews. They were damned to drown in burning "pitch (tar), the same material "to caulk the ships with for repairs that call". The demon Malebranche (literally means,"Evil Claws") plunges the sinners further deeper into the pitch.
5. The sixth bolgia contained the hypocrites, "weeping as on their way they circled slow, Crushed by fatigue to look at, and despair. Cloaks [of lead] had they on with hoods pulled down full low Upon their eyes..." Upon one man, they all walked. The man, "crucified by three stakes to the ground, who, when he saw me, writhed as in despair..." was guilty of preaching, yet acting contrary...the embodiment of "do as I say, not as I do". 
6. Onto the seventh bolgia which was"fraught with serpents" that pursued the naked sinners who had been thieves in their former lives. "Their hands [became] were bound by serpents at their rear"while yet another serpent "...darted forward, him to bite At where the neck is by the shoulders met." Even more tragic, after the bite, "he kindled, burst in flame, and crumbled all to ashes. The ashes of themselves together rolled, resuming suddenly their former frame." From ashes, the sinners resume their former human "frame", only to be bitten again.
7. The eighth circle was reserved for the"fraudulent counselors", those priests who had lied to their church-goers, forever damned to "lurk in every flame". My Leader, seeing me lost in thought: "In all the fires are spirits, His flame round each is for a garment wrought."
8. In the ninth boglia, reserved for those who seek to divide the church, I seek sinners "Slit from the chin all downward to the cleft. Between his legs his entrails drooping hung;". The Islamic prophet Muhammad was there too, and as I exited, a sinner spoke to me, "Kinsmen so close since I asunder tore, severed, alas! I carry now my brain". He was forever damned to hold his head, decapitated, in his hand. 
9. And into the tenth, and final, bolgia we enter. Its sinners were falsifiers, liars of every kind - counterfeiters, the birthers of bastards, the speakers of non-truth, and alchemy, the turning of metals into gold. For their punishment, they seek to relieve themselves "Against the itch which plagues them furiously. The scab they tore and loosened with their nails, As with a knife men use the bream to strip, Or any other fish with larger scales." They literally work against an itch they cannot scratch.