Con artists target their victims or marks, disguise their true motives, get close to their victims, gain their trust and defraud them. By the 19th cen

Con artists target their victims or marks, disguise their true motives, get close to their victims, gain their trust and defraud them. By the 19th century, many criminals gravitated to the life of the confident man. In many cases, victims did not realize that they had been bamboozled not until it was too late and they had lost quite a bit of their fortune. There are many prolific and notorious con artists of the past. Let’s look at a few of them in history.  1. Victor Lustig Lustig had a money box scheme where he sold a mechanical box which he said copied $100 bills. He put a few $100 bills in the box which came out of the machine until it ran out. By then, Lustig was long gone. While in Paris, he “sold” the Eiffel Tower when he pretended to be a government official and claimed that he was selling the Eiffel Tower for scraps. Lustig tried selling the Eiffel Tower a second time but the mark went to the police. In America, he made counterfeit $100 bills until he was arrested in 1935. Victor Lustig was called by the Secret Service agent at his trial “the smoothest con artist that ever lived.” 2. John St. John Long In 1826, Irishman John St. John Long, who had no medical background, claimed that he had developed a cure for tuberculosis. Of course this caught the attention of many people who went to him for care. He used a chemical which was inhaled and a lotion made of turpentine used to rub the chest and back of the patient. The lotion caused a sore which he said was the infection coming out of the body. He was found guilty of and sent to prison when one of his patients died.  3. Reed Waddell Waddell moved to New York from Illinois in 1880. He got involved in the green goods con where he advertised the sale of counterfeit money to gamblers, which they would use to place bets. They paid Waddell in advance but never received the counterfeit and since this was illegal, they couldn’t report it to the police. He also had the gold brick con where he gold-plated large amounts of lead and sold them as bars of gold. He included an amount of real gold which he gave to jewelers to check for its authenticity. He swindled more than $250,000 from unsuspecting customers. Waddell was betrayed and assassinated in 1895 by his partner of five years. 4. William Thompson William Thompson walked up to strangers on the streets of New York City and pretended they were past acquaintances. His courteous and respectable deportment added to his charm. After a few minutes of conversation, he would ask his mark whether he or she had enough confidence in him to trust him with their watch until the following day. Many people fell for it and he walked away with their watches never to return them. Thompson was arrested in July 1849. 5. Henry Lemoine Henry Lemoine claimed that he could manufacture diamonds from coal in his lab. He invited executives from De Beers Diamond Mines and Sir Julius Wernher to witness the demonstration. He successfully completed the procedure a few times and presented them with twenty diamonds. Wernher, who was impressed, paid Lemoine 1.5 million francs over three years to keep the formula a secret and to fund more research. A Persian jeweler claimed that he had sold the diamonds to Lemoine, who was later indicted for fraud.    &nbsp;

History’s Most Prolific Con Artists

Recent Posts

Categories

Get TriviaWire in your inbox.