Julia Garner stars as Anna Delvey (Sorokin) in the Netflix miniseries “Inventing Anna.”
The original “Confidence Man” was a charming outlaw from the 1840s named William Thompson. His “scam” was to strike up a conversation with a stranger, gain their trust, and then ask them an awkward question: Did they trust him enough to lend them that day's gold watch? Yes, people really fell for it.
And times haven't changed much. It's amazing how far some people will go to scam unsuspecting friends and strangers. Here are five more cunning con men (and women).
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- Charles Ponzi and his infamous 'scheme'
- Anna Delvey, the 'SoHo scammer'
- Natwarlal, the 'King of Contras'
- Simon Leviev, the 'Tinder conman'
- Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish financier who invented a country
1. Charles Ponzi and his infamous 'scheme'
You know you're a talented con artist when they name an entire crime after you. In the 1920s, Charles Ponzi scammed investors out of about $32 million (about $475 million today) using the infamous “scheme” that now bears his name.
A Ponzi scheme starts with an investment opportunity that is too good to be true. In the case of Ponzi, he guaranteed to double his investors' money in just three months by buying and selling “international reply coupons”, a way of paying in advance for foreign postage on international mail. Details were vague, but Ponzi's early investors became rich just as he promised.
This is why Ponzi schemes are able to scam so many otherwise smart people. They appear to be extremely profitable. The problem with the Ponzi scheme – and with later iterations such as Bernie Madoff's record-breaking investment fraud – is that the money is never invested in an actual security. Ponzi and Madoff simply took the flood of money coming in and returned it to the early investors (and themselves, of course).
Financial swindler Charles Ponzi looks charming in this 1920s photograph.
At one point, Ponzi was receiving $1 million a week from eager Americans betting their futures on his incredible investment opportunity. When the Boston Post exposed the Ponzi scam, he was arrested and his investors lost their homes and their savings. Less than a century later, Madoff “made off” with $19 billion before his Ponzi scheme collapsed.
2. Anna Delvey, the 'SoHo scammer'
From 2013 to 2017, it seemed like Anna Delvey was everywhere—European art exhibitions, exclusive New York nightclubs, hotels priced from US$$4,000 a night—and was “close friends” with everyone from famous actors to business moguls. technology and trust fund fashionistas. With her vaguely European accent, couture clothes, and habit of tipping crisp US$ 100 bills, everyone assumed she came from money.
So when Delvey's credit card was declined at fancy restaurants, or the airline wouldn't let her pay cash for first-class tickets to Morocco, she asked one of her new friends to cover the expenses. She would pay him back, of course. But she never did, and they were embarrassed to bring it up.
Delvey's schemes began to unravel in 2017, when she was kicked out of several New York hotels and restaurants for nonpayment, and was featured in a New York Post article under the headline “Aspiring Socialite Arrested for Not Paying Expensive Bills Hotel .
Delvey's real name is Anna Sorokin, a Russian-born German citizen who has worked her way into the inner circles of the fabulously rich, young and gullible. Until she was caught. Sorokin served more than three years in prison and currently remains in U.S. immigration custody. She is the subject of the fictional Netflix drama “Inventing Anna”.
3. Natwarlal, the 'King of Contras'
India's most notorious and celebrated con man has been credited with “selling” the Taj Mahal to clueless tourists, forging Indian President Rajendra Prasad's signature and escaping from prison at least eight times, including once in a guard's uniform. Born Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava, India's “king of the cons” was better known as Natwarlal.
Natwarlal was a talented forger and actor. One of his favorite cons was to pose as a personal assistant to a dignitary or politician and enter a jewelry store, placing a large order for expensive watches to be presented at a special government ceremony. When it came time to pay for the watches, Natwarlal arrived in a chauffeur-driven car and took the jewelry store employee to a bank, where Natwarlal appeared with a perfectly forged cashier's check for the full amount. By the time the check bounced, Natwarlal had already left.
Natwarlal boasted that no prison could detain him for more than a year, and this was no exaggeration. He was sentenced to 113 years in prison for dozens of scams, but only served 20 of them. His most brazen escape occurred in 1957, when he escaped from Kanpur prison wearing a smuggled guard's uniform and paid the guards with a suitcase full of money that turned out to be old newspapers. Another time, he pretended to have kidney disease in police custody and convinced his captor to take him to a fancy hotel where he was supposedly staying so he could get money to pay the doctor. At the hotel, he escaped his captors.
In India, a particularly talented conman is called “Natwarlal” after the legendary thief, who was also the inspiration behind the 1979 Bollywood thriller, “Mr. Natwarlal”. He died in 1996 or 2009, depending on whether you believe his brother or his lawyer. Even in death, the blow continued.
4. Simon Leviev, the 'Tinder Scam'
On the popular dating app Tinder, all it takes is a single “swipe right” to initiate a connection with a complete stranger. It's also the perfect place for a con artist to find their next target. For years, Simon Leviev charmed a series of beautiful, successful European women into trusting and even loving him, and then allegedly scammed them out of around US$10 million.
When Leviev dated someone, he presented himself as the heir to a fortune from the Israeli diamond industry and appeared to have the money to back it up. He took his new girlfriends on his private jet and treated them to luxurious meals and stays in four-star hotels. What they didn't know is that all of this was being paid for by the last woman who fell for their fraud.
Just as the relationship was getting serious, Leviev would reveal that his life was in danger and that he needed to send money from a third-party account so that he could not be traced. Her worried friends complied, charging her credit cards tens of thousands of dollars or even sending her a suitcase full of cash. Leviev would soon disappear, using the swindled money to finance his next scam.
Leviev (real name Shimon Hayut) served just five months for similar schemes committed in Israel, but has so far avoided criminal charges for his European cons. As of this writing, he is a free man and is considering a career change to Hollywood. His scam was also the subject of a Netflix documentary.
5. Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish financier who invented a country
At the beginning of the 19th century, European investors were looking for new places to park their money and Latin America seemed very attractive. With the fall of the Spanish Empire, there were a number of new, independent countries in Latin America, eager to attract investors to their growing economies, and their debt was repaid better than European bonds. If you could handle the risk, Mexican bonds would pay 6%, for example.
Enter Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish financial schemer who would have made Bernie Madoff blush. With so much enthusiasm for Latin American investments, MacGregor decided to invent his own Latin American country called Poyais, off the coast of Honduras. MacGregor not only convinced hundreds of investors to buy Poyais government bonds, but dozens of Scottish families boarded ships and emigrated to this made-up nation!
Did not went well. Instead of finding friendly natives and fertile soil, the colonists found malaria and malnutrition. Two-thirds of the original 250 Scottish settlers died and the British Navy was sent to return more ships that had left for MacGregor's promised land. Undeterred, MacGregor tried the same scam again in France, but they threw him in prison.
In total, MacGregor raised £1.3 million by selling fake government bonds, which are now worth around $5 billion. Persecuted by angry investors, he died in exile in Venezuela.
Now this is interesting
A 2021 book alleged that legendary conman Frank Abagnale of “Catch Me If You Can” fabricated his entire criminal past, and that the wild stories of a teenage Abagnale posing as an airline pilot and working for the FBI were “completely fictional.” .
