The 10 greatest conmen of all time

As Bernard Madoff (pictured above) accustoms himself to life behind bars, Times Money lists the ten greatest conmen of all time. Entries are ranked by creativity and chutzpah, not merely scale of takings:

1. George C Parker (1870-1936) made a career of "selling" New York landmarks, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Statue of Liberty, to naive newcomers. His favourite was Brooklyn Bridge, which he flogged an average of twice a week for years - complete with impressive "title deeds" - before being sentenced to imprisonment for life at the notorious Sing Sing in 1928

2. Gregor MacGregor (1786-1845) invented the Central American state of Poyais, a fertile territory of 12,500 square miles rich in precious metals. He appointed himself its cazique, or prince, "sold" land and rights there to gullible British investors and raised a loan of £200,000 on behalf of the Poyais Government. When the scam was exposed here, he took it to France with some success

3. Victor Lustig (1890-1947) operated swindles across Europe and America before being sent to Alcatraz. His first success was the repeated sale of a "money-printing machine". This cost the buyer $30,000 and produced two $100 bills, then blank paper. He is best known for posing as a corrupt offical to "sell" the Eiffel Tower to a scrap metal dealer for a large sum, plus bribe

4. Frank Abagnale (1948-) passed bad cheques for $2.5 million as a teenager during the 1960s. He also posed as a Pan Am pilot, doctor and attorney to milk various perks. As a "pilot", for instance, he took advantage of free "deadheading" flights to 26 countries, complete with hotel stays. He served four years in prison, escaping once, and now advises businesses on fraud

5. Charles Ponzi (1882-1949), made millions from the pyramid scheme which now takes his name before it collapsed in 1920. After serving a jail term in Massachussets, and running a second scam selling swampland while out on bail, he was deported to Italy. There he advised Mussolini on finance before fleeing to retirement in Brazil with a chunk of the dictator's treasury 

6. Philip Arnold (1829-1878) perpetrated the Diamond Hoax of 1872 with his cousin John Slack. The pair bought cast-off stones and planted these across a field in Wyoming, which they showed to prospective investors, including Baron Rothschild and Charles Tiffany of Tiffany & Co. The latter bought the cousins' interest for $660,000. He later sued, but the case was settled out of court

7. Howard Welsh (1953-) and his partner Lee Hope Thrasher reportedly made $31 million from a Ponzi scheme that targeted Christians with a "tax-free investment" marketed as "a divinely-inspired mission that behaves like a diocese, a church, a mission or assembly”. The couple were arrested in Shropshire in 2004 after a two-year FBI manhunt and later jailed in Virginia

8. Gerd Heidemann (1932-), a journalist on Germany's Stern magazine, sold the rights to the "newly-discovered diaries of Adolf Hitler" to his employer for $6 million in 1983. These were a crude forgery by his friend Konrad Kujau but nevertheless fooled historian Hugh Trevor-Roper among others. Heidemann maintains that he was conned by Kujau but was convicted and jailed for three years

9. Shaun Greenhalgh (1961-) made a series of forgeries which duped leading art institutions in a garden shed in Bolton. These included a "Gauguin" sold to the Art Institute of Chicago and an "ancient Egyptian" statuette authenticated by the British Museum. Greenhalgh's parents were convicted with him in 2007 for posing as the cash-strapped owners of his numerous creations

10. Bernie Madoff (1938-) perpertrated the largest swindle in Wall Street history with a £36 billion Ponzi scheme that fooled the financial world before its collapse last year. Victims included HSBC, charities and a plumber invited to participate after he saved the life of Madoff's son. The sometime philanthropist pleaded guilty yesterday, but just $700 million of his haul has been traced 

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Comments

[James]

Conmen are not to be celebrated.

[Mr G]

The worlds biggest con-man was Muhammed to so called prophet.

[Tim]

You left off Tony Blair and how he conned a nation into war.

[Kazuki]

You also missed out George Bush and Dick Cheney!

[Rob S]

@Mr G: No, Muhammed didn't sink to 'walking on water' and 'loaves and fishes' type scams. I nominate Jesus for first place..

[Bob]

At least Jesus didn't plagiarise every ancient text around at the time and call it a religion...

[antonio da silva]

What is his true name?

Is it MAD-OFF or
MADE-OFF?

[CS]

You've missed two (admittedly in historical context small fry):
Tony Blair & Gordon Brown. Managed to sell the UK down the river - for nothing.

[Petter]

Immortals and immorals. The 10 conman burn in hell for sure. Why degrade each other's religion? the comparison is irrelevant.

[Joao]

At least two more cases should be included: Alves dos Reis a portuguese folk that managed to make "real" fake money and wanted to buy the Bank of Portugal and also the guys that tried to make a fortune from a device to locate oilfrom a plane ("les avions renifleurs").

[MICHAEL]

IT IS SURPRISING THE RECKLESS VANITY OF PEOPLE WHO FELL FOR BIG PROMISES OF UNREAL YIELDS.
GREED WAS THE IMPULSE OF PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS WHO FELL.
MODESTY IS THE NEW GUIDELINE FOLKS AFTER WE RESHAPE FROM THE BIG MELTDOWN.

[Nuno]

Why Ivar Kreuger, the swedish Match King, seen as the original Madoff of the early post World War I time is not included on this list? At a time he was responsible for the financial scandal of his century.

[M]

Paul Bint dubbed "King con" - posed as a Barrister, performed hand surgery amongst other antics (the film Paper Mask was based on his character). Has been in a couple of NOTW spreads. And is a distant relative of mine! What a guy.

[Lee]

I love con men. But number 10 has got to be number one for the amount alone

[robert]

the 2 biggest, still at large: Bush and Blair.
Conned millions of people into a war.

[Marky Mark]

Madoff should be number one. The amount is the most, his scam lasted the longest, and he convinced the best and brightest (and apparently the greediest) to give him their millions while others shook their head and wondered why they couldn't see the obvious - he hid in plain sight.

[damien]

Well thats interesting and most of the worlds most notorious conmen are Americans. No wonder the world doesn't trust them.

[Saiful]

You also missed out Israel.

[Albee]

Saiful, in case you didn't actually notice, this is about people are
countries are not people. Yours is the kind of all-pervading ignorance conmen just love to exploit!

[John briddon]

Please change the heading on this article to "THE TEN MOST INFAMOUS CONMEN"
These people are or were crooks and this should be made clear in your heading

[Don Pryor]

Hey, I got a new term for getting ripped off or jacked for your goods. Example, "I just got Madoffed" Of course, that is what his lawyer was also hoping to do. :--(

[Don Pryor]

I would like to suggest, the government step in and compensate the victims.

As someone without money, as of yet, I can see no satisfaction in watching others become dirt poor & losing their hard earned money.

[Jacko]

What about Gordon Brown?

[Charles]

You forgot the great Joseph Ady (1770-1852), one of the most notorious British swindlers of the Nineteenth Century, so outrageous there were even cartoons about him in Punch magazine.
Ady apparently was a respectable-looking elderly man, a Quaker. His scam was to look through lists of unclaimed dividends, estates or bequests, and unclaimed property generally. He then sent letters to large numbers of people with the same name saying that if they sent him his fee of twenty shillings they would be informed of 'something to their advantage.' To all those who fell for this he sent a second letter telling him that in such a list was a sum or an estate due to a person of his name, and on which he might have claims worthy of being investigated.
Ady added insult to injury by never paying for the postage on his letters (this had to be paid by the recipient).
Ady never told anyone that the information he supplied would be of advantage, simply that it might. It was this very narrow tightrope of legality that he teetered along for decades on end.
Every three months or so Ady would be brought before a court by a complainant but he always managed to evade conviction. Transcripts of court cases show that he remained cool, calm, clever and self-possessed throughout. The blustering magistrates never laid a glove on Ady.
Ady was so prolific in his crimes that he became a newspaper celebrity, one of the very first. The headlines would read “Joseph Ady again” and the story would regale readers with an account of someone who had been conned and how Ady had again escaped conviction. Though Ady became notorious he always managed to find new, often well-educated, victims and his crimes went on for decades. As late as 1846 he was still sending out his letters (he made life easy for himself towards the end by printing his “something to your advantage” letters).
Ady was eventually put out of business by the Post Office in 1847. They changed the law so that the postage due for unpaid letters that were refused or undelivered had to be paid for by the original sender.

I own one of Joseph Ady's scam letters from 1833. It is a treasured possession.

[Tim]

If any thing this list remind all of us about moderation. Sex or making money, if you can't control that demon you turn into a madoff.

[edward dexter]

Why the massive gaol sentence on Madoff? Is he worse than someeone who swindles just one old lady? Had I been in his shoes, I would never have apologised. Remember the old adage "Never give a sucker an even break". Edward

[mat]

was not this newspaper conned by no 8 i think

[Laura Roberts]

Ernest Saunders, the former Chairman of Guinness.

Convicted of fraud, and the only human being on the planet to ever develop incurable Alzheimer's (which was the reason for him receiving a lower soft sentence) and miraculously recover from it.

For some reason, he and his Doctor have been somewhat reluctant to share with the world and Alzheimer sufferers how he managed to achieve the scientifically impossible. Perhaps Lord Justice Neill who reduced his sentence because of his submitted condition would like to explain it all?

The man served just 10 months in a luxurious open prison for a fraud of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Incredibly free from his incurable Alzheimer's, Saunders has gone on to advise companies such as Carphone Warehouse.

[PETER UNDERHILL]

Tony Blair-flawed personality-huge majority but still needed spin doctors from day one.More interested in looking sfter his white teeth and his International Image(now non existant)than the British People.Also the British people for being so gullible as to vote him in,not once but several times..

[G]

Let's not forget L. Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith...they still have thousands of people who believe their cons...and who happily "tithe" their money away...

[Joe]

Did not the English government sell of your gold for cheap in the 1990s?

[Steve]

What about the money changers and taxes that go into a black hole.

[Bob Knight]

But what about Educating Archie!
If having a ventriloquist on radio isn't a perfect con, then what is?

Bob Knight, Israel.

[Lorraine]

The Roman Catholic church really ought to be on this list of scams.

[Paul]

What about Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints or Mormons....it's one thing to take people's money but it's another to take their soul...

[Jimmy]

Gordon Brown is the greatest conman of all, with millions fooled by his 'I ended the economic cycle' conning huge numbers into reckless massive debts. While he did the same to the taxpayer, taking national debt to wartime levels, after ordering the FSA not to regulate RBS and HBOS which were run by his best friends Fred 'Shred' Godwin and 'Bing' Crosby. Amazingly, considering they destroyed the UK banking system, Brown respectively had them knighted and promoted to head the FSA.

[Rob De Witt]

1. Barack Hussein 0bama.

1. Al Gore

Tough to choose.

[Vladimir Matic]

Here is how the US financial institutions could gain a huge profit: by betting against themselves in all markets! The 888 per cent profit of Lahde Capital would be just like a kids toy compared to that.

[Mike Ryan]

I liked Madeoffs style. He first conned his friends, then his co-religionists, then israeli pension funds, finally the gentiles ! It shows he had an ecumenical approach to greed !

[AJ Fraser]

What about James Reavis the "The Baron of Arizona"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_of_Arizona

All he did was to claim Arizona(fake forged documents ect)Wiki is a good read,Reavis should be in any conman's list.If the information on Wikipedia is accurate, the real James Reavis was more conspiratorial. He sought partnerships with a group that included George Hearst (William Randolph's father) to push his claims through. With the backing of fat cats eager to lay claim to a whole territory, Reavis tried the same gambit several times. He eventually married a fake Peralta heir and called himself the Baron of Arizoniac, but a Surveyor General named Royal Johnson disproved his cheap forgeries, along with many claims by copycat fakers. Reavis eventually spent three years in prison.

[abharrisson]

1/ Tony Blair... swept to power on an anti corruption and transformation pledge. Later had to fire (and then re-hire) several ministers for dodgy loans, false passports, and dubious expense claims. Squandered about £200Bn of taxpayers money raising taxes over 100 times (when commiting not to do so), produced the fake report on iraq which persuaded the country to go to war costing billions and hundreds of lives, changed the exam system so that students miraculously got better results when really things hadn't changed, allowed the chancellor to pretend that Britain wasn't heavilly indebted by keeping debts "off balance sheet" (a practice viewed as fraud in the commercial world) etc. Ably assisted by his then chancellor Gordon Brown Mr Blair escaped before his fraud completely unravelled and is now believed to somehwere in the middle east or selling snake oil to the americans at £65,000 a day.

[Emmer]

guys you are forgetting the biggest conmen of the decade: The one and Only George Bush (junior). if not for this stupid legacy of starting WW III there would be no financial trouble across the world and fuel prices would not be so high..

[Duncan F]

I am surprised you omitted Bernie Cornfeld of IOS Investors fame. His downfall cost billions of dollars and was a classic pyramid (i.e. Ponzi) scheme in the 70's.

[Vladimir Matic]

Emmer

Interesting remark on Bush's WWIII comment! Thinking now: it really seems all the mess started after that comment (oil prices, financial turmoil). What a stupid creature he was.

If the crisis goes to deep (long) the WWIII might still be the final outcome.

I presume GWB only wanted to please his AIPAC bosses, but he did it so tactlessly and crudely. Presidents, generally, shouldn't be talking like that (in public).

[Mark T]

These clearly aren't the greatest conmen, as they got caught.

[Caroline]

The biggest conmen are in the Sauerland area of Germany, in the form of lawyers and the courts. Thank you for cheating my mother and I out of our life savings,and stealing 10 years of our lives, shame on you

[Foivos]

Greatest con of all time? How about the war on terror as a smoke screen for people not to look at what was going on in the backround (i.e. the animals of wall street and city of london going wild with our money). As a delaying strategy of the inevitable recession that was looming over our heads since 2003. Some people made a lot of money. US military asked (and received) $500bn for the war in Iraq from the UN which was spent on folders and stationary and lined the pockets of US businesses.
Greatest con of all time? The war on terror.

[John Waynesworld]

You folks that are naming George W. Bush as one of the greatest con men are giving him way too much credit, or retrospectively naming yourself as the recipient of a very small brain indeed!

Try one that is closer to home...George Soros. Didn't he try to destroy your pound by short selling? Just like he's doing to the American dollar? Hmmm?

[Frank]

Fiovis, are you hallucinating? We don't borrow money from the UN. We pour our money into a powerless sinkhole.

[nig]

Don't forget do Nothing Dave Cameron the heir to Blair he claims have polices but has nothing to offer

[stuart munro]

You seem to have omitted the first king, the first lawyer, the first doctor, and the first journalist, as well as such notable frauds as Herodotus, Alexander, and Columbus.
Bill Gates should be high on any list, and Paulson and Bernanke still seem to be extraordinarily well paid for frankly pitiful and unprofessional performances.

[Mike]

Well said Mr. G.
But the biggest conman in American History is without any doubt is Barack Hussein Obama akn Barry Soetoro.
This man has lied and cheated his way to be President of the USA distributing trillions of dollars on liberal fantasies. Not bad for a British citizen.