Ten Famous and Most Brazen Con Artists in History
Then, she put the eggs back in the chickens, forcing them to put them a second time so they could be seen by witnesses. The stranger hid near her barn early in the morning and saw her do it.
6. Joseph Prushinowski was called the Hasidic Robin Hood
Prushinowski ran several scams over the years that netted him millions of dollars. He managed to wait for the statute of limitations of many people, but others still followed him when he was finally arrested in 1998.
Part of the reason he was able to evade capture for so long to make him appear in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries is the help he received. He doesn't keep the money he stole for himself. He distributed it among the Orthodox Jewish community and they protected him for it. All told it was believed he swindled around $190 million.
7. Anthony Gignac (Pretended to Be a Saudi Arabia Prince)
Najran, Arab Saudi
- Times of Israel
Anthony Gignac pretends to be a Saudi prince to cheat and gain access to wealth. Despite being arrested nearly a dozen times for fraud in which he pretended to be royalty; he escalated his scam to $8 million in fraud over several years.
The scam involves using this fake persona to secure investment money, which he spends on himself. His scam was shattered in an attempt to fool some Miami hotel owners when they saw him eating pork, something a Muslim prince would not do, and hired an investigator to look into it.
8. John Keely's Fake Engine
For years people have been looking for newer and better resources. The John Ernst Worrell Keely scam promises just that. In 1872, he claimed to have created a powerful machine that took advantage of the physics of sympathetic vibrations and essentially made energy out of nothing. He raised $10,000 in a year.
Called the Etheric Force Machine, Keely kept delaying explaining the machine because it was a fake. But he still builds up thousands of them and gives false demonstrations that one can't investigate too closely. The machines break the ropes, the bars bend; do all sorts of. By 1880 he had 3,000 investors but none owned the machines.
