The Most Ridiculous Scams In History

There are lots of ways to get famous, gain notoriety and above all, get rich quick. Here are some of the most incredible ways people have done it.
You might recognise the story from the 2006 British film ‘Alien Autopsy’ in which Dec from Ant & Dec played Ray Santilli, a British music entrepreneur who claimed to have footage of a real-life ET dissection. By the way, he also worked with Eighties reggae kids Musical Youth – and he’s yet to admit which was more fundamental to his worldview.
Having apparently been given this secret tape by a rogue cameraman who filmed it at Roswell in 1947 (did this guy just really love ‘Pass the Duchy’?), it was broadcast around the world in 1995 and Santilli became something of a celebrity.
Alas, it was a load of old cobblers. People at the time suspected something was up and Santilli eventually admitted that the film was a reconstruction. However, he continues to say that it was only a recreation of a tape he definitely did see in 1992 of which was too degraded to broadcast and there are snippets of the original autopsy in it.
You’ve got the money mate, you should probably cut and run. No doubt there’s a secret Yeti movie out there somewhere.
Isabel Parker, Queen of the slip-and-fall
“Dear [insert whichever insurance company you want in here], I just keep on falling over, please give me more money.” So must have gone the message on Isabel Parker’s answerphone. Don’t know Parker? She’s only called the Queen of Slip-and-Fall.
Frankly, it’s not a particularly salubrious royal appointment. The 72-year-old lifelong gambling addict pretended to fall over and hurt herself a staggering 49 times during her ‘career’, before asking the shop/supermarket/whatever to pay for her made-up injuries. I mean, did she actually own a pair of decent shoes?
Unfortunately, all good lies come to an end. She ended up under four-year house arrest. Let’s just hope she doesn’t have any slippery surfaces at home.
Photographing fake fairies
The Cottingley fairy story is remarkable in that it was perpetrated by young girls and one of those duped was legendary writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who clearly didn’t share the detective skills of his creation Sherlock Holmes.
Cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith took five photos of what they said were fairies near the stream behind their house between 1917 and 1920. The story became a national sensation, with photography experts at the time claiming the snaps were genuine.
Years later, the girls admitted four of the five shots were faked – with cardboard cut-outs supported on hatpins – though they said they had seen fairies and that the fifth picture was real.
Whatever the truth, kudos to two kids aged 16 and 9 for demonstrating some mad photography skills.
Our house is haunted
The Amityville Horror is something of an iconic horror, based on a book written about the apparently true paranormal experiences of the Lutz family in 1975 when they moved into a house that was the site of six murders on Long Island.
Tales of demonic pig-faced imaginary friends (yikes), irrational swarms of flies and cloven-hooved footprints in the snow certainly made for a compelling story – plus millions in book sales and box office revenue – but how true was it?
The Lutzs maintained it was real until their deaths, although they admitted some of the book had been embellished for dramatic purposes. But various admissions have suggested otherwise, while in 1979 the lawyer for the guy who killed the initial six people came right out and said, “I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine.”
Certainly the subsequent owners have never experienced even a peep from a ghoul, so if it is nonsense, then bravo for creating an entire franchise around a drunken lark.
Catch me if you can
Anyone who’s seen the Leonardo DiCaprio film with the above title will know how devious Frank Abagnale was. And also how cool his life was most of the time.
A prolific cheque forger, he also impersonated a pilot so he could fly around the world for free. Terrifyingly, he admitted that a few times he’d even been given control of the plane.
Obviously deciding that endangering the lives of multiple people on an aircraft wasn’t quite exciting enough, he tried his luck as a lawyer and – unbelievably - faked his way into becoming a supervising paediatrician at a hospital in Georgia.
A spectacular liar of world-class standing (and some have questioned all the amazing things he claims to have done in his life), he was eventually captured and served five years in federal prison, before getting out to help the FBI tackle fraudsters, which he continues to do to this day.
The man who sold the Eiffel Tower twice
Say what you like about Victor Lustig –liar, cheat and fraud are just some of things that would be totally cool to call him – but the man had balls of steel.
His Eiffel scam was particularly impressive, twice bringing together a group of scrap metal merchants, persuading them he was from a secret government department that had been told to sell the edifice for scrap and then rocking off with the money.
He even duped Al Capone.
Unfortunately, he was undone in the most mundane way – a scorned lover grassed him up to the coppers. He managed to escape their custody briefly, but ended up in Alcatraz and died of pneumonia in 1947.

Yahoo report