Peter Foster In August 2020,
a team of police officers filmed themselves tackling and arresting a man named Peter Foster
on a beach in North Queensland, Australia. Many called the dramatic arrest overkill.
Others felt that Foster deserved the public humiliation. Foster calls himself
an "international man of mischief," is one of the most prolific conmen in history.
Bai Lin Tea Western countries such
as England are obsessed with weight loss, especially easy solutions that require no
exercise or dieting. Enter Bai Lin Tea, a brew from China with alleged weight loss effects.
Foster started marketing Bai Lin as an effective weight loss product in the 80s
with surprisingly successful results, given that it was just regular Chinese black tea.
Veronica Ali, the third wife of Muhammad Ali—whom Foster was good friends with at
the time—introduced Foster to the magic tea. Foster brought Bai Lin
back to his home in Australia and created an unbelievable
marketing strategy to sell the tea to people seeking easy weight loss solutions.
He billed Bai Lin as an "ancient Chinese diet secret" and a "slimming tea." Foster
says he put on extravagant exhibitions showing how well the product worked.
The tactics fooled many people into giving Foster their money for a phony magical tea.
Foster supposedly worked hard promoting Bai Lin tea, but he wasn't alone.
He had a partner of sorts: 80s pin-up girl Samantha Fox.
Samantha Fox The 80s were a wild time.
And very few models embodied the decade quite like Samantha Fox. With some calling her the
most photographed woman of the 80s, Fox was a prominent adult symbol in her heyday. She was also
a pop star, releasing several international hits with titles like "Touch me (I want your body)."
These days, she's most remembered by her generation as a Page 3 girl.
Page 3 was basically the Playboy of Britain, and you could find it in The Sun, a popular
tabloid magazine. The Sun asked Fox to do a topless photo, and her stardom grew from there.
According to the International Man of Mischief himself, Foster and Fox met at
a party. Foster recognized her that evening and intentionally ignored Fox nearly the entire night.
He says he talked to every woman in that place except for Fox until she finally approached him
and asked him to dance. Foster says he read in that morning's newspaper that
she could have any man in the world. To him, she could have every man except one… Foster.
Foster is a self-proclaimed master of "reverse sale": a marketing strategy that entices
potential customers by either underplaying your cards or ignoring potential customers.
The strategy, according to Foster, worked on both customers and women.
And though his story might not be true, Foster did indeed date Samantha Fox.
At the time, Fox was in her early 20s. She said in subsequent interviews that she never
dated someone like Foster ever again and blamed the lousy relationship choice on her young age.
Fox, at the time, couldn't see the real reason Foster wanted to marry her:
the marketing wizard needed free advertising.
Bai Lin tea was selling well, but it could always sell more.
And products like mystical Chinese weight loss tea are perfect products for influencers to endorse,
especially an attractive, physically unattainable person like Fox.
Throughout their short relationship, Foster asked Fox to help promote his tea, and she obliged.
At the height of her career, Fox told people in her home country, the U.K., to buy Bai Lin tea.
Believe it or not, Fox wasn't Bai Lin's most famous spokesperson.
Foster reeled in another famous British woman with direct ties to the British Royal Family:
the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson.
The Duchess Like Fox,
the Duchess was all over British tabloids, but for different reasons. The Duchess of York,
more commonly known as Fergie, is Prince Andrew's ex-wife. Every member of the Royal Family deals
with vast amounts of attention from the press. In the same breath, they also wield a tremendous
amount of influence. And anyone associated with them automatically brings credibility, prestige,
and Royal wonder—in other words, the perfect kind of person to promote a weight loss tea.
Foster enlisted Fergie to promote Bai Lin tea throughout Britain,
completely unaware that the product was a scam.
Cheri-Gate Eventually,
Australia figured out Foster's scam and fined him thousands of dollars, leading to the tea business
filing for bankruptcy in 1988. Other conmen would have given up. But Foster wasn't your average
conman. He'd been scamming since his 20s when he swindled $49,000 from an insurance company.
Foster still got caught for it and was subsequently fined over $70k.
Nevertheless, Foster kept working—kept scamming. He filmed a documentary with Muhammad Ali,
attempted to promote one of his fights, and marketed a new method for quitting smoking.
After the Bai Lin tea scam failed, Foster left the U.K.
and traveled to the United States with a 'new' weight loss tea he dubbed Cho Low.
He eventually got in trouble for selling Chow Low tea and
moved back to the U.K. Foster immediately got back to his usual activities after moving:
marketing phony products and investments and wooing famous women.
This time, the victim was married to the most powerful man in Britain,
then prime minister Tony Blair.
Cherie Blair only spent 5 minutes with Foster,
but it was enough time to convince her he was for real. The international man of
mischief knew Cherie through a mutual friend named Carole Caplin, whom Foster was dating.
Foster learned that Cherie wanted to buy two properties in Bristol
but didn't want to pay the retail price.
The pair corresponded through email—emails that came back to haunt them years later.
By the early 2000s, Foster was a well-known fraudster, especially in England,
where he committed his most epic crimes. It would look bad for any public figure to hire
Foster as their unofficial financial advisor and negotiator, much less the prime minister's wife.
An individual named Paul Walsh realized the gravity of the situation and called Foster to
offer him an ultimatum: pay $93,000, and he won't leak the story of Foster's dealings with Cherie.
Foster roped Walsh into investing in another one of his weight loss schemes
called Renuelle. Walsh had already sunk thousands into the business and was worried
that he'd lose their investment capital if Foster and Cherie's relationship went public.
Foster alerted Downing Street, the British equivalent of the White House,
and they immediately hired a crisis P.R. consultant. Sure enough, three days after
they hired the consultant, the Daily Mail broke the story, and everything erupted in chaos.
Needless to say, no one looked good in this story. Many were outraged that the prime
minister's wife had allowed a con artist into the inner circle of Downing Street.
Initially, Downing Street denied knowing Foster. Then Daily Mail published the email exchanges
between Cherie and Foster, showing that they knew each other and talked like business associates.
In one email, Cherie called Foster a star, telling him they were "on the same wavelength."
Cherigate was a disaster for both Cherie,
her husband Tony, and Foster, who was back in the news again for scandalous reasons.
Foster wasn't the only one hurt by the negative publicity. His mother,
who'd never scammed anyone in her life, felt the public's wrath.
Louise Foster-Poletti Louise Foster-Poletti was a
successful real estate agent working primarily on the rapid development of Gold Coast, a beautiful
skyscraper-laden city on Australia's east coast. Despite a successful career in real estate,
Louise's life, legacy, and reputation were tarnished by her son's dictionary-sized
list of crimes. People also criticized her for showing continued support for her son.
She advocated for her son many times, visiting him in jail once a week,
campaigning for his release, and asking the U.K. not to extradite him, and succeeding.
In 2019, Foster's mom revealed that she had terminal cancer. Foster rushed back home to
see her when he heard the news and took care of Ms. Foster during her final 18 months.
Foster told interviewers that he helped care for his bedridden mom like a nurse would,
even taking her to the bathroom when she needed help getting there.
He says that’s perhaps the only worthwhile thing he's done in his entire life,
and will always regret ruining her name along with his. He also said that those 18 months
were the most fulfilling and satisfying times of his life.
HK BTC Foster has been pulling
cons since the 80s, but that doesn't mean he's old school. His most recent con involved a technology
that most young people are familiar with: crypto. In 2020, Foster scammed a pilot from Hong Kong
out of $1.7 million worth of Bitcoin. The scam revolved around
a sports betting company called Sports Predictions that Foster was promoting.
Foster, operating under the fake name Mark Hughes,
told potential investors that a hired mathematician
would use their skill to predict the outcomes of sporting events with near 100% accuracy.
The savvy fraudster accepted Bitcoin as payment from the pilot and ran off with the man's money.
Arrest In December of 2021,
a team of professional fugitive hunters tracked Foster down to a home in Victoria,
Australia, where he'd been staying while on the run for 6 months. When they arrived,
the team of officers broke down the door and burst into the home. They found him
inside and dragged a disheveled-looking Foster out of the house by his arm.
Ironically, this wasn't Foster's most bizarre arrest.
His most iconic arrest occurred in Fiji, where Foster was literally running away
from police. He was cornered on a bridge and decided he'd rather face the water.
So, Foster stripped down to his underwear and leaped over the side. On his way down,
Foster hit his head on a boat and passed out in the water.
Fijian police proceeded to fish Foster's unconscious
body from the river and put him into a truck.
Aftermath Foster's career is entering its twilight
period—even though he's still scamming people, one of his main goals is to change how people
remember him. He says he will accomplish this seemingly impossible feat by telling his story
in cinematic form. Yes, Foster wants to film a movie about his life, but from his point of view.
His plan is pretty simple: Foster will market the book he wrote on his life
and career as a conman—similar to Frank Abagnale's highly disputed memoir—and
hope a filmmaker wants to adapt the book into a biopic.
According to an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald,
Foster says he's very aware of his "putrid" reputation, as he calls it,
and hopes that people will better understand him after seeing his story.
However, Foster's hopes are a bit misplaced. Foster has never turned over a new leaf,
unlike Abagnale, who redeemed himself after years of crime.
Every time he gets out of prison, Foster starts a new scheme or multiple schemes in
some cases. And he's been running through the same cycle for his entire adult life.
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Let us know in the comment section who’s worse:
Someone who scams people out of their life savings OR hitmen working for cartels?