Here are scammers of all time who would have thrived today!
6 – George C. Parker “If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you…
“. We’re willing to bet you’ve heard that before. George C. Parker was the man responsible for that
famous line selling the Brooklyn Bridge. He made his living making fake and obviously illegal sales
of property he didn’t own. They were often New York's most famous public landmarks, and he “sold”
the property to people who had no idea that they couldn’t actually buy a town’s public properties.
Now that’s just something we don’t understand, how would anyone think they can buy a bridge from
someone that’s clearly not part of the government? His favorite object for sale was the Brooklyn
Bridge, something he sold twice a week for YEARS somehow. He convinced his customers
that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway.
Believe it or not, police had to stop naive buyers from putting up toll barriers to the bridge on
more than one occasion. Other public landmarks he incorporated into his scams included the original
Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grant's Tomb AND the Statue of Liberty.
After Parker’s third conviction in 1928, he was sentenced to a life term at Sing Sing Prison.
For his scams, Parker is remembered as one of the most successful con men in the history of the US!
5 – Gregor MacGregor Imagine trying to sell a fake island that’s
nowhere close to where you are. And that’s the beauty of this scam that MacGregor used to run.
Back in the day before planes were invented, we bet a scheme like this would have been super
easy to do. Gregor MacGregor's fake island scheme has been called one of the best cons in history.
He would pose as a Scottish soldier and adventurer. He would try to draw British
and French investors and settlers to a place called "Poyais", a fictional Central American
territory that MacGregor himself made up. He claimed to rule as the "Cazique" from
1821 to 1837. That’s just a fancy made up word for Prince that Macgregor came up with.
Gregor MacGregor made his fortune when he scammed hundreds of investors that he was the prince of
the fictional country of Poyais. Not only did Gregor MacGregor gain the trust and money of
people, he also created a fictional guidebook detailing the geography and abundant natural
resources of his fake island. The meticulous detail in the leather-bound guidebook, and
the cost of having it printed, was exactly what it took to get people to buy into his huge scam.
The guidebook is called Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, Including the Territory of Poyais.
The capital was called St. Joseph, a seaside town of wide paved boulevards, colonnaded
buildings and mansions, where as many as 20,000 people supposedly lived. St. Joseph had a theatre,
an opera house and a domed cathedral. The Sketch went so far as to claim the rivers of Poyais
contained quote "globules of pure gold”. Hundreds of investors put their savings
in the supposed Poyaisian government bonds and land certificates. The crazy part is,
over 250 people ACTUALLY tried to emigrate to MacGregor's invented country in 1822
only to find an untouched jungle! More than half of the people ended up not making the trip back.
MacGregor deliberately targeted his fellow Scotsman, just because he thought they would
be more likely to trust him since he was one of them. Those people’s unfortunate attempt
to emigrate to the island served to reassure later potential investors in more of the fake
Poyaisian bonds and land certificates he sold! Of course, people eventually found out what was
really going on. MacGregor simply fled Scotland and went to France and ran the SAME scam, and
he was caught. The French court tried MacGregor and three of his accomplices for fraud in 1826.
Even after his trial and conviction for fraud, he was able to continue
selling non-existent land and stock to European nobility in London over the next decade! Later on,
he moved to Venezuela where he died and was somehow buried with full military honors.
4 – Charles Ponzi This is the guy who made the pyramid scheme
so popular, his name took it over. Ponzi was an immigrant to the US, as he originally was from
Italy. When he first arrived in the US, he took on a variety of jobs ranging from dishwasher to
waiter to bank teller. Eventually, he decided to stop working for other people and set up his own
small office in Boston in the summer of 1919. After setting up shop, Ponzi received
a letter from a company in Spain that contained an international reply coupon,
something he had never seen before. He did research into what it was, and he realized
that there was a weakness in the system which would allow him to make money, in theory.
The purpose of the postal reply coupon was to allow someone in one country to send a letter
to another person in another country. They then could use the coupon to pay the postage of a
reply. IRCs were priced at the cost of postage in the country of purchase, but could be exchanged
for stamps to cover the cost of postage in the country where it’s redeemed. If these values
were different, then there was a potential profit. Inflation after World War I had greatly decreased
the cost of postage in Italy, to the point that an IRC could be bought cheaply in Italy
and exchanged for U.S. stamps of higher value, which could then be sold. And that’s the backbone
of what Ponzi would sell to investors. He claimed that the net profit on these
transactions, after expenses and exchange rates, was in excess of 400%. Ponzi began
asking friends and acquaintances for money. He promised his investors a guaranteed 50% return,
or if they kept their money with him for longer, 100% in 90 days. He did this in an environment
where banks were paying 5% annual interest. Some people invested and were paid off as
promised, receiving $750 interest on initial investments of $1,500 dollars.
Word spread, and investments started coming in at an exponential rate! In February 1920,
Ponzi's total take was $5,000. By March of 1920, he had taken in $25,000. By June of 1920, people
had invested TWO AND A HALF million dollars in Ponzi's scheme! By July 1920, he was bringing in
a million dollars a week. By the end of July, he was approaching a million dollars per day!
He was bringing in cash at a ridiculous rate, but the simplest financial analysis showed that
he wasn’t making any profit. He was simply losing money rapidly because of what he promised on the
returns. Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors.
People soon began to become suspicious and the press were starting to publish negative
articles about him. Inevitably everyone started to demand all their money back at
the same time, and it all came crashing down. Federal agents raided his office and shut it
down and basically that was the end. Ponzi wasn’t the first one to come up with a pyramid scheme,
but the scheme became so famous and well known, Ponzi’s name just became
associated with any pyramid schemes. At its peak, nearly 75% of Boston's
police force had invested in Ponzi's scheme! His scheme ran for over a year before it collapsed,
and it cost his "investors" $20 million dollars. He was eventually deported back to Italy where he
died in poverty in 1949. 3 – Soapy Smith
Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith was basically your typical do it all hustler back in the wild
west when the US was still developing. From running a gambling hall, to selling cigars,
to running a soap scam where he got his nickname, Soapy, Smith was basically just an old school
gangster. He was arrested for running his famous soap selling scheme. The policeman had forgotten
Smith's first name and wrote "Soapy" in the records instead, and the name stuck.
His soap scheme was his most famous scheme, and here’s how it worked. While he was traveling
around the Southwest, Smith would briefly set up shop in the street selling bars of
soap wrapped in blue tissue paper. He’d speak to the crowd of curious onlookers,
and he would pull out his wallet and begin wrapping money, ranging from one dollar up
to a hundred dollars, around a few of the bars. He then finished each bar by wrapping plain
paper around it to hide the money. He promised that a few lucky buyers would find a $100 bill
wrapped inside a few of the bars of soap that he sold for 5 bucks. One of his accomplices
would be one of the first people to buy a bar of soap, and he’d happily show the crowd he found
a genuine $100 dollar bill inside. Of course, there were no soap with any $100 dollar bills.
Soapy Smith had a lot of different businesses and schemes, but each of them looked to
scam the customer. He opened businesses with the primary goal of let’s call it,
”gently” robbing his customers. Ultimately his unethical ways caught up to him in his decision
to back up some of his accomplices in a 3 card monte game. His men just decided to outright
steal from someone they were trying to scam. Nope, Soapy didn’t make it out of that shootout.
2 – Cassie Chadwick Andrew Carnegie was
one of the richest Americans ever. And he was the perfect person for Cassie Chadwick to use.
She scammed several U.S. banks out of millions of dollars, by claiming to be an illegitimate
daughter and heiress of Andrew Carnegie! She was able to make a loose connection to
Carnegie using her husband's acquaintance, a lawyer named Dillon. He had him take her
to the home of Andrew Carnegie. She wanted to visit Carnegie’s housekeeper in order to
try to steal some information. When she left Carnegie’s house she went to see Dillon again.
She dropped a sheet of paper on the ground on purpose in front of him. He picked up the
paper and noticed it was a promissory note for $2 million dollars with Carnegie's signature.
She told Dillon to keep it a secret as much as possible,
and when Dillon promised to keep her secret, she "revealed" that she was Carnegie's illegitimate
child. This is where the con got legs. Somehow the story got around to Carnegie,
and apparently Carnegie felt so guilty about the situation that he gave her huge amounts
of money even though it was a complete lie. Getting money from Carnegie wasn’t enough
for her though. She wanted way more! She decided to con banks as well.
She claimed to banks that she had $7 million dollars in promissory notes tucked away in her
Cleveland home, and that she was supposed to inherit Carnegie's fortune one day.
Banks obviously ate all this up, and for the next eight years she used her fake background to obtain
loans that eventually totaled between $10 and $20 million dollars. She was smart enough to know no
one would ever ask Carnegie about an illegitimate daughter for fear of embarrassing him.
However, things started going downhill, as it always does for people who steal money
consistently. In November of 1904, she received a $190,000 dollar loan from Herbert B. Newton,
a Massachusetts banker. Newton was shocked when he learned about the other loans Chadwick
had received. So he called his loan back. Chadwick couldn’t pay up and the bank sued.
At the time, she had accumulated debt totaling around FIVE MILLION dollars!
Her gig was up. When Carnegie was finally asked about her, he denied ever even knowing her.
Chadwick fled to New York, but was soon arrested at her apartment at the Hotel Breslin and taken
back to Cleveland. In January of 1906, Chadwick was sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary in
Columbus. She brought with her trunks of her personal stuff for her prison cell, along with
her own furniture. Surprisingly, the prison warden allowed this because of her celebrity status!
1 – Victor Lustig He was the scammer who could
probably go down as one of the greatest, because of his ingenuity. One of his most famous scams
and best example of his ingenuity was his scam in selling the Eiffel Tower. And he did that,
twice! Just like selling the Brooklyn bridge earlier, it’s hard to believe that someone would
fall for this. But this is how good the story is. In 1925, as France was recovering from the war,
the upkeep of the Eiffel tower was an almost unbearable expense for the city of Paris.
Lustig read a newspaper article talking about the expensive upkeep regarding the
Eiffel Tower. And that’s when he came up with his scheme. He gathered a group of scrap metal
dealers and told them that the upkeep on the Eiffel Tower was so outrageous that the city
couldn’t afford to maintain it any longer. They wanted to sell the tower for scrap.
He told the men that there was going to be certain public backlash, so they HAD to keep
everything secret until the deal went through. One of the metal dealers that bought the story
was Andre Poisson. He was convinced and he handed over the money to Lustig. When he realised he
had been conned by Lustig, he was actually too embarrassed to tell the police what happened! One
month later, Lustig returned to Paris and was successful again in selling the Eiffel tower,
except this time the victim wasn’t too embarrassed to tell the police.
The idea of selling the tower wasn’t as implausible in 1925 as it would be today.
The Eiffel Tower had been built for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and it wasn’t intended to be
a permanent fixture in the city. Here’s what’s next!