Masterful Deceptions: Greatest Confidence Tricks in History

1. Would I lie to you? Some of the greatest, most famous confidence tricks of all time.

2. In 1925, Victor Lustig read that the cost of maintaining the Eiffel Tower was proving to be a burden on the post-war French economy. Pretending to be a government official, he invited six scrap metal dealers to a secret meeting.

3. One of the dealers, Andre Poisson, paid a large sum of cash to secure the deal. When he later realised he had been duped, he was too embarrassed to go to the police.

4. George Parker regularly sold public buildings. A favourite was the Brooklyn Bridge, which he sold twice a week for several years. Police were often called in to remove toll booths set up by Parker’s gullible customers. Parker also sold Madison Square Gardens, the Statue of Liberty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

5. In the late 1870s, ‘Soapy’ Smith regularly pulled off ‘the Prize Package Soap Sell Swindle.’ Smith would gather a crowd and let them see him wrap money – ranging from $1 to $100 – around ordinary bars of soap. He would then add an outer wrapper and offer to sell the bars for $1.

6. An accomplice in the crowd would buy a bar and loudly claim to have got one with money in it. Desperate not to miss out, the crowd inevitably started buying the soap themselves.

7. Smith would, of course, secretly remove all of the bars with actual money and sell only the ordinary soap. At some point he would announce that the $100 bar of soap was still unsold, and proceed to auction off the remaining bars to the highest bidders.

8. In 1871 Philip Arnold and John Slack sold over $500,000 worth of shares in a diamond mine in Wyoming. Investors were impressed on a site visit, with gems littering the ground in the mine. They promptly paid up to buy a share in the mine.

9. Unfortunately, the gems had all been placed by Arnold and Slack. The mine was just an ordinary cave. The gems were subsequently valued at a mere $30,000. The investors lost everything, Arnold and Slack made a fortune.

10. In 1911, Eduardo de Valfierno paid a team of men, including Louvre staff members, to steal the Mona Lisa. Prior to the theft, he commissioned a forger to produce six fake versions of the painting. He lined up potential buyers and had the forgeries shipped abroad.

11. When news of the theft became public, Valfierno proceeded to sell the forgeries, passing them off as the real thing. He didn’t need the real painting, so he didn’t bother contacting the thieves again. Two years later, the thieves were caught and the real Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre.