20 Absurd Scams From History That Actually Worked

In London she introduced herself as “Princess Henrietta Maria van Wolway” of Cologne and took a husband, an 18-year-old clerk whose relatives thought she had a fortune. Twice married already, Mary Carleton was tried for bigamy at the Old Bailey in June 1663. With no witnesses to turn up to prove her earlier marriages, she was acquitted. Later convicted of theft, Mary Carleton was transported to Jamaica and hanged in 1673 after illegally returning before her sentence was up.

Law managed to persuade the Regent of France to grant his Mississippi Company a monopoly on Louisiana trade. He exaggerated the extent of gold found there and issued paper banknotes unbacked by anything, causing the price of his shares to rise from around 500 to 18,000 livres in three years. There were no operational mines. Although the ensuing crash destroyed France’s public credit, it created the term “millionaire.”

Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy forged Queen Marie Antoinette’s signature to talk Cardinal de Rohan into buying a 1.6-million-livre necklace, and an accomplice even lured the cardinal to Versailles for a rendezvous with “the Queen” in the dark, actually a prostitute in Marie Antoinette’s dress. After the necklace was broken up and sold piece-by-piece in London, the Queen, who had refused to buy it, was vindicated by the Parlement de Paris in 1786, yet pamphleteers (basically the era’s tabloid media) kept the affair alive for years.

In 1817 a woman named Mary Baker arrived in Gloucestershire wearing foreign dress and speaking a tongue that she had made up. Her accomplice acted as interpreter and claimed she was a “Princess Caraboo” from an island called Javasu. She was received by gentry in nearby Almondsbury, who fed and cared for her for some ten weeks until a former landlady spotted her. She had taken no money, only board, reputation, and prestige.

MacGregor actually did own a land grant that a Mosquito Coast king had given him, along with the title of “Cazique” of the region called Poyais. He also published a travel guide under a pseudonym, which described a thriving capital city. All of it, though, was a lie. He sold more than £200,000 worth of bonds to investors for the settlement and sent about 250 settlers there. Over 150 perished in that swampy, malarial wasteland before aid finally arrived.

In the 1840s, William Thompson would approach some well-dressed stranger and pretend to be their old acquaintance. He’d say, “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” The man, too courteous to say no, would hand over his watch; Thompson would then pawn the watch for cash. In 1849, when Thompson was arrested, the New York Herald coined the term “Confidence Man.” He didn’t need force or a weapon. He just needed his manners.

In Chicago, George Hull carved out a 10-foot, 2,990-pound gypsum giant. He then acid-stained the statue and buried it on his cousin’s farm in Cardiff, New York. When workmen unearthed it in October 1869, Hull began to promote it as a petrified biblical giant, demanding 50 cents a look. The paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh figured out that the thing was just carved gypsum before the end of the year, but the crowds still paid.

A man calling himself “Lord Gordon-Gordon” persuaded railroad magnate Jay Gould that he was in possession of 60,000 shares of stock in the Erie Railroad, and persuaded Gould to give him $1 million in negotiable stock. Gordon-Gordon then sold the stock and took off for Manitoba. Gould’s men illegally seized him in Canada, which triggered a diplomatic row between the state of Minnesota and the Canadian government. When extradition seemed likely, he committed suicide in August 1874.

Prospectors Philip Arnold and John Slack bought about $20,000 in low-grade uncut diamonds and rubies in London. In a process known as salting, they scattered them across a remote mesa on the Colorado–Wyoming border to trick potential investors. They displayed some of the gems to local bankers in San Francisco and to Charles Tiffany of Tiffany’s, who put the value of the collection at $150,000. Arnold and Slack amassed about $660,000 from investors for the claim before the geologist Clarence King uncovered the hoax in late 1872.

John Ernst Worrell Keely said he had discovered a mysterious etheric force that was drawn out of water and air and set in motion by little more than tuning forks. He demonstrated spinning engines and levitating spheres. He wouldn’t share his secret or apply for patents, yet investors like John Jacob Astor IV put up millions of dollars over 26 years to keep going. When Keely died in 1898, investigators pried up the floorboards and found a two-ton compressed-air tank underneath.

Thérèse Humbert said an American millionaire had bequeathed her a 100-million-franc inheritance, which was in a sealed court safe awaiting resolution of lawsuits. The wax seals on the safe attested only to its being sealed, not to anything inside. But Thérèse used the seals as collateral to obtain more than 120 million francs in loans from French banks in the course of two decades. In May 1902, the courts finally forced the safe open, but all that was inside was an old newspaper, an Italian coin and a trouser button.

In Skagway during the Klondike, crime boss Jefferson “Soapy” Smith had a telegraph office, charging gold miners $5 per message to Seattle. An operator clacked a key in the office. But real telegraph lines didn’t reach Skagway until after 1901. The wire out back ran about 50 feet into the bushes and stopped. The office was really there to figure out who was carrying cash.

Elizabeth Bigley, calling herself “Cassie Chadwick,” had successfully forged Andrew Carnegie’s signature on $7 million worth of bogus promissory notes stating she would inherit $400 million. Embarrassed by the thought that they might offend Carnegie by making inquiries, the bankers agreed to give her loans totaling more than $2 million. By late 1904 the whole affair had unraveled, and a bank in Oberlin, Ohio, went under. Bigley was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and Carnegie showed up at her trial to confirm he’d never met her.

On October 16, 1906, unemployed ex-convict Wilhelm Voigt purchased a secondhand Prussian captain’s uniform. He then ordered two groups of actual Prussian soldiers to march with him into the town of Köpenick. Voigt entered the town hall, arrested the mayor for alleged bookkeeping mistakes, and took 4,002 marks out of the municipal treasury. He left a receipt for the money, despite having no written orders authorizing any of it. His power came from his uniform.

Amy Bock, a woman, posed as Percival Redwood: a prosperous male sheep farmer. The ruse was to woo Agnes Ottaway at Port Molyneux, New Zealand. She secured loans and gifted property using forged deeds, then married Ottaway in an Anglican ceremony on April 21, 1909. Four days into their honeymoon she was arrested by the police for forgery. The Supreme Court annulled the marriage that June.

In July 1919 British MP Horatio Bottomley established the Victory Bonds Club, which allowed working-class members to purchase £1 shares in pooled war bonds that would pay out lottery-style prizes. More than 500,000 people invested over £800,000. Bottomley purchased only a fraction of the promised bonds; the remainder went to buying racehorses and newspapers. He was found guilty of fraud in May 1922 and served a seven-year prison sentence.

Victor Lustig printed fake government letterhead and posed as Deputy Director of Posts and Telegraphs, and invited five scrap metal dealers to the Hotel Crillon in Paris in May 1925 to bid on 7,000 tons of “condemned” ironwork from the Eiffel Tower. He chose the most insecure of the dealers, André Poisson, sold him the metal and accepted a 70,000-franc bribe to keep quiet, then fled to Vienna. Poisson never went to the police. A second sale took place months later but there are no contemporary records for that, only memoirs from years later.

Oscar Hartzell insisted the Drake estate had never been settled, that it was sitting there unclaimed in British vaults, and that he was the only heir. He rented an apartment in London and peddled shares in a phony lawsuit, promising that if the lawsuit won, the 70,000 to 80,000 mostly Midwestern investors would get 500 times their money back. The victims lost more than $2 million. The Drake estate had been settled in 1596. After Hartzell was convicted in 1934, his supporters gave him $500,000 for his defense.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. assumed the identity of Dr. Joseph Cyr and became a surgeon lieutenant on a destroyer called the HMCS Cayuga during the Korean War. He was locked in his cabin with a medical book, pulling out bullets and cutting off limbs. Leaning on experienced corpsmen and doses of penicillin, he managed to keep all 16 major casualties under his care alive before being found out.