10 People Who Conned Their Way Through Life

In 1770, a Hungarian man named Wolfgang von Kempelen invented a chess-playing machine nicknamed the Turk. For nearly 84 years, the machine played and defeated many human challengers. It wasn't until 1854, when the Turk was destroyed by a fire, that it was revealed to be a hoax. It wasn't the machine that played the game, but a chess master hiding inside it. In the 1880s, a notorious Greek arms dealer, Basil Zaharoff, sold a steam-powered submarine to the Greeks and convinced the Turks that this posed a threat and sold them two of them. Then, he persuaded the Russians into buying two more. None of these submarines ever saw action, because they never worked. In 1919, a man named J.D. McMahon implied that he would build a 480-foot skyscraper, but in the contract, labeled it 480 inches. According to the plans, the building was built and was just 40 feet tall. He left with the investment money. McMahon even won the court case against him because technically he didn't defraud anyone. The investors didn't check the blueprints. The Newby McMahon building is nicknamed the world's littlest skyscraper. In the 1930s, Count Victor Lustig sold the Romanian box to many unsuspecting victims. This was a machine that he claimed was capable of duplicating $100 bills. In 1935, on the day before his trial, he made a rope out of bedsheets and slipped out of the as he descended the outside wall of the Federal House of Detention building in New York. During most of the 20th century, Indian conman Natwarlal repeatedly sold the Taj Mahal, the parliament, along with its sitting members, and various other famous historical sites. He was sentenced to 113 years, barely spent 20 years in prison, and escaped nine times. The last time he escaped was when he was 84 years old, and his whereabouts remain a mystery until his death. In the 1970s, a Brazilian footballer named Carlos Kaiser faked his decade-long football career because he wanted to be a footballer but did not want to play football. Kaiser would always show up for individual physical training, but every time he needed to train with the team or play the game, he would feign injuries or change teams. He even started an unprovoked fight with supporters once when he was going to be forced to play. As a young man, con artist Steve Commissar advertised a piece of equipment called a solar-powered clothes dryer in national magazines for $49.95 each. Unwitting customers who bought it just received a length of clothesline. Since the 1980s, and for over 20 years, American financier Bernie Madoff ran one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history, with fraud amounting up to $64.8 billion as of 2008. Before his arrest in December 2008, the company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, was one of the top market-maker businesses on Wall Street without even trading. In 2002, a man named Nick Russian auditioned 30 people to participate in a new British reality TV show, in which they had to earn $1 million within a year. The whole show was a hoax, as he did not take any money from the participants, a criminal case was not pursued. Also, there was no civil case, due to a lack of funds. In 2013, a US IT worker outsourced his job to China for one-fifth of his income, while he sat at his desk browsing the internet. He got caught following a security audit in which suspicious VPN activity was discovered. It turned out that he had done that to multiple companies in the area. While he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, he only paid the Chinese consulting company around $50,000.