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Billy McFarland -

In 2017, more than 5,000 people purchased tickets for the event of the year: a hotly anticipated luxury music festival. It promised the experience of a lifetime: a tropical island setting, luxury accommodation, gourmet food, amazing music acts, and the opportunity to rub shoulders with A-listers like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid.

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Billy McFarland -

Fyre Festival, as it was called, was organized by 25-year-old Billy McFarland. He was the young CEO of the company Fyre Media. He teamed up with rapper Ja Rule to launch his business idea: an app that connected users with A-list artists so they could hire them for events. Together, they decided to organize a festival. McFarland enlisted investors by lying about his company’s net worth and his personal wealth.

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Billy McFarland -

McFarland paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to supermodels like Emily Ratajkowski and Kendall Jenner to hype the festival on social media.

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Billy McFarland -

McFarland didn't have the skills or the resources to deliver what he'd promised. He had to cut every corner and the festival was a complete disaster. The luxury accommodation became basic tents, the gourmet food became cheese sandwiches, and most of the acts pulled out. McFarland had taken US$26 million from customers and investors, including Ja Rule. He was sued for fraud in 2018 and sentenced to six years in prison. He served four years of his sentence and was released in 2022. 

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Frank Abagnale Jr. -

The incredible story of Frank Abagnale Jr. was immortalized, and certainly glamorized, by the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio movie ‘Catch Me If You Can.’ The movie was based on the book Abagnale wrote about his life in 1980. He allegedly started working as a con man at the age of 15 and pulled off some truly inconceivable scams while he was still in his teens.

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Frank Abagnale Jr. -

According to Abagnale, he posed as a lawyer, a doctor, a college professor, and, for a prolonged period, as a Pan American airline pilot. He did this by creating a fake pilot’s license, obtaining a uniform, and then acting as a “deadhead,” a pilot who catches a ride in the cockpit to his next take-off point. During this time, he claimed he also cashed US$2.5 million in forged checks, all while being chased by the FBI.

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Frank Abagnale Jr. -

According to Abagnale, he was finally caught by the FBI and served a five-year prison sentence. He went on to write a book about his exploits, started his own security company, and sold the rights to his story to Steven Spielberg. It’s estimated that he has a net worth of around US$10 million.

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Frank Abagnale Jr. -

In 2020, journalist Alan C. Logan published a book that offered some pretty damning evidence that Abagnale’s accounts of his cons were false. Perhaps his greatest con was monetizing a completely made-up story.

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Anna Sorokin -

Anna Sorokin, who went by the name Anna Delvey, posed as a European heiress to elevate her position in New York society and enlist investors for her plan to create an exclusive social club.

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Anna Sorokin -

Sorokin lived out of hotels that cost hundreds of dollars per night, tipped the staff in hundred-dollar bills, and generally lived like someone who had endless funds at her fingertips. She befriended New York’s elite in the worlds of fashion, finance, and art, convincing them all that she was the real deal. She managed to secure investments and loans for her immensely expensive project, all without ever providing solid proof of her background or wealth.

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Anna Sorokin -

Sorokin came extremely close to securing two separate loans for US$25 million each from a bank and hedge fund before she was finally caught. She was charged with grand larceny in 2019 and sentenced to four years in prison. She was released and allowed to carry on her sentence under house arrest in 2022. The Netflix drama ‘Inventing Anna’ starring Julia Garner tells her story with some embellishment.

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Jerome Jacobson -

Since the 1980s, McDonald’s has launched various promotions where customers can win money or prizes if they find a token in their food order. At one point, the fast-food chain teamed up with the game Monopoly to create McDonald's Monopoly. Customers were in with a chance of winning if they found one of the Monopoly game pieces in the packaging of their meal.

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Jerome Jacobson -

Each game piece was worth a cash prize, ranging between US$2,000 and $1 million. McDonald’s hired a printing company called the Dittler Brothers to produce the game pieces for the competition. This is where the con comes in. A security employee called Jerome Jacobson saw an opportunity to make some serious cash when he was put in charge of safekeeping the pieces.

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Jerome Jacobson -

Jacobson realized just how easy it would be for him to slip a few of the pieces into his own pocket. He gave them out to his friends and family, who agreed to cash in the prizes and split the winnings with him in return. This low-key scam eventually snowballed into a wide-reaching crime network. He enlisted other con men, ex-convicts, gangs, and even one family of Mormons.

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Jerome Jacobson -

Jacobson’s wealth grew and grew through the decade-long scam. He bought multiple properties, rare cars, and went on luxury vacations. All in all, he made away with US$24 million of McDonald's money. The FBI finally caught Jacobson in 2001 and sent him to prison for 15 years.

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Sylvia Browne -

Sylvia Browne claimed that her psychic abilities began when she was a toddler. She founded the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research in 1974, followed by the Society of Novus Spiritus, through which she taught her followers her beliefs about God and spirituality.

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Sylvia Browne -

Browne claimed that her psychic abilities had helped the FBI to solve numerous crimes. She built up her reputation on such accolades and charged her customers US$850 to ask her questions. She rose to fame after becoming a regular on ‘The Montel Williams Show,’ where she offered advice to the parents of missing children based on her “premonitions.”

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Sylvia Browne -

She gave one famously false reading to the parents of missing six-year-old Opal Jo Jennings, who had been taken from her grandparents' yard in Texas. Browne told them that their daughter was still alive but had been sold into slavery in Japan. Jennings' body was later discovered in Texas. A study of 115 of her predictions about missing children showed that 25 were false and the other 90 of the cases remained unsolved. She was convicted of investment fraud and grand theft in 1992.

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Victor Lustig -

Victor Lustig was an incredibly smooth multi-lingual con man who operated in France at the beginning of the 20th century. He posed as a wealthy passenger on ocean liners, where he found his marks. He would tell his new rich acquaintances that he had a magical box that produced money. If you put in a hundred dollar bill, it would return two hundred dollar bills. The new bills were, of course, counterfeit, but he managed to convince many gullible travelers that it was a highly valuable contraption. He constantly traveled and found new 'customers' on each crossing—selling his magical boxes to them for US$10,000 each time.

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Victor Lustig -

After a while he went to Paris to carry out his biggest scam. He posed as a French government official and wrote letters in which he claimed to be organizing the sale of the Eiffel Tower. He wrote that “Because of engineering faults, costly repairs, and political problems I cannot discuss, the tearing down of the Eiffel Tower has become mandatory.” He sent the letters to the owners of scrap metal companies, saying they would sell to the highest bidder.

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Victor Lustig -

The bids came pouring in, and Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower not once, but twice. He took the money and quickly moved to the US, where he gained further notoriety for a counterfeit banknote operation. He was finally caught in 1935 after an intense car chase with the FBI. As he exited his car, he reportedly said to the officers, “Well, boys, here I am.”

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Charles Dawson -

Charles Dawson was an English lawyer who enjoyed amateur archaeology in his spare time. Dawson had been elected a fellow of the Geological Society and later the Society of Antiquaries in London, giving him some clout in the archaeological community.

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Charles Dawson -

In 1912, archaeologists around the world were shocked by a groundbreaking discovery Dawson had made in Piltdown, Sussex. He had unearthed a humanlike skull with animalistic teeth, unlike anything the scientific community had ever seen. He presented his findings to the Geological Society, who marveled at what they believed to be the missing link between man and ape.

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Charles Dawson -

Dawson passed away in 1916, and while his discovery was widely accepted by most, some questioned its veracity long after his death. In 1953, scientists at the University of Oxford used new techniques to examine the so-called Piltdown fossil.

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Charles Dawson -

They discovered that Dawson had carved and combined pieces of a human skull and an ape skull to create the false impression of a major archaeological discovery. It was later found that he had also been creating false artifacts and selling them to collectors for several years.

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Countess de Lamotte -

Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Remy was born in France in 1756. Her father had a somewhat noble lineage as the descendant of an illegitimate child of King Henry II, but didn’t have any money himself. She ended up in the care of the charitable Marquise de Boulainvilliers after her father died begging on the streets of Paris and her mother abandoned her. She was sent to school to become a nun, but ran away and met another adventurous soul called Nicholas de la Motte.

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Countess de Lamotte -

De la Motte worked as a police officer and didn’t earn enough money to keep them in the style they preferred. They moved to Paris and shamelessly tried to ingratiate themselves with members of the royal court to elevate their status. Jeanne called herself the Countess de la Motte, despite the fact that her husband was not a count. She started an affair with a wealthy cardinal (pictured), whom she tricked into believing that Queen Marie Antoinette was a close friend of hers. She stole a great deal of money from him by forging letters from the Queen, pretending she was requesting a loan.

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Countess de Lamotte -

She later convinced the cardinal that the Queen was in love with him, partly by hiring a prostitute to pose as Marie Antoinette and meet with him! She manipulated him into buying an incredibly valuable diamond necklace for the Queen, worth around US$12.5 million in modern money.

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Countess de Lamotte -

Her husband took the necklace to England and began selling the diamonds, but the scheme was uncovered back in Paris. Regardless, the public believed that the purchase was the Queen’s idea and an indication of the unfair distribution of wealth in France. The “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” was one of the catalysts for the French Revolution, which ultimately saw Marie Antoinette beheaded.

Sources: (All That's Interesting) (Esquire) (CNBC) (HeadStuff)

See also: The worst crimes in history

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