Con artists are everywhere these days, whether it's swindlers on Tinder, fake German heiresses on Instagram, or people sending texts begging for money. Oh no sorry, that last one was just my teenager.
Many of these latest frauds rely on the internet but of course scammers were scamming long before we sped on to the information superhighway. And many of the con artists of yore would have given any fake Nigerian prince a run for his imaginary millions.
Take, for example, Victor Lustig, who clearly lived by the motto that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. That's how he sold the Eiffel Tower.
In 1925, the Austrian-Hungarian fraudster read an article bemoaning the cost of maintaining the Eiffel Tower and hit upon a ruse. Posing as a French government official, he checked into the prestigious Hôtel de Crillon, and summoned some of the country’s top scrap metal dealers to meet him. He let them on the secret that the tower was to be dismantled because of the expense and the falling attendance numbers, and he was overseeing its disposal.
André Poisson was the unlucky winner of the contract, and he was duped on the double, having been encouraged to part with a generous bribe to sweeten the deal.
By the time he realised he had been tricked, Lustig was in Austria, living his best life with Poisson's cash. The confidence trickster later returned to re-enact the scam with a different group of scrap metal dealers, but the alarm was raised by one of them and he left town in a hurry.
George Parker was another man who knew how to make a quick exit. And he also had a penchant for selling things that didn't belong to him.
Parker was the New York-born son of Irish immigrants but that didn’t stop him from ripping off other immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
One of his most successful scams was to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to people who had arrived fresh off the boat.
His sales pitch claimed the bridge had been approved for tolls and a fortune awaited the buyer. He reportedly sold the bridge at least twice a week for many years, earning as much as $5,000 on some sales, but also settling for $75 if the immigrants had no more money.
Police routinely had to stop the excited new bridge owners from erecting toll barriers on the landmark. But why stop at the Brooklyn Bridge? Parker didn’t.
He also dabbled in selling the Statue of Liberty and Madison Square Gardens. Had he returned to his roots in Ireland, he would have sold the Cliffs of Moher to dozens of misty-eyed Americans faster than they could have shaken a shillelagh at him.
But while his crime affected many people, they never sparked a revolution. Leave that to the redoubtable Jeanne de la Motte who was credited with hastening the fall of the French monarchy.
This confidence trickster was born into poverty but longed for the finer things in life. Married, but enthusiastically unfaithful, she started an affair with the wealthy and well-connected Cardinal Louis de Rohan in the 1780s.
Now there was a man of the cloth who didn’t take his vow of chastity too seriously. She learned that he was trying to get into Marie-Antoinette’s good graces, so she convinced him that she was one of the queen’s confidantes.
She used the forging skills of another lover to send fake letters from the queen to the cardinal. These got more intimate as time passed and led the cardinal to believe that Marie-Antoinette was in love with him. When it was suggested that the queen would love a wildly extravagant diamond necklace, he made arrangements with the jewellers.
Not surprisingly, Jeanne de la Motte was the go-between, and no sooner had she received the necklace than it was whisked away to London and broken up for sale. When the swindle was uncovered in 1785, it helped to discredit the monarchy.
Although blameless in the affair, the already unpopular queen was vilified for her supposedly immoral conduct. And from then on, things went from bad to worse for Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, culminating in the French revolution and their execution.
And what became of the wily Jeanne de la Motte? After being found guilty and imprisoned, she escaped and fled to London where she wrote a memoir protesting her innocence.
In 1791, she died after jumping from her apartment window. She was reportedly trying to escape from a debt collector, somewhat belatedly proving the point that crime doesn’t pay.