In 1814 a man wearing a British military uniform rowed up to a dock on the coast of the English Channel and told the guards there that Napoleon had been killed. Immediately riders were sent to London. When traders on the London stock exchange heard the news they celebrated by bidding up the price of stocks. But soon after they realized the truth, that the war against Napoleon was still raging on. They had been tricked. Immediately the market dropped again. But in the meantime, someone had profited handsomely from the temporary rise. The mysterious military officer who had initially delivered the news had long since disappeared, so it was unclear who engineered the scheme. The finger of blame was pointed at a popular military hero, Lord Thomas Cochrane, who was thrown into prison. But the evidence against him was never very strong, so historians consider this puzzle unsolved. More→

On May 18, 1864 two New York City newspapers reported that President Lincoln had issued a proclamation ordering the conscription of an additional 400,000 men into the Union army. The implication of this news was grim. Evidently the war was not going well and might drag on for years to come, putting further strains on the nation's economy and manpower. Share prices on the New York Stock Exchange immediately plummeted, while gold, considered to be a safe, inflation-proof investment, rose in value. However, it soon became clear that the proclamation was not real. The Associated Press issued a statement denying they had sent such a dispatch, and the State Department sent a telegram declaring the proclamation to be “an absolute forgery.” More→

Prescott Jernegan claimed he had found a way to cheaply extract gold from sea water. His "Gold Accumulator" consisted of a wooden box, inside of which was a pan of mercury mixed with a secret ingredient. A wire connected the mercury to a small battery. When lowered into the ocean, this contraption supposedly sucked gold out of the water.

A test conducted in Narragansett Bay in February 1897 proved the gold accumulator worked. After a few hours the box was raised, full of gold flakes.

Soon Jernegan had found investors who helped him found the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company. When the company offered stock, the share price rapidly rose from $33 to $150. But to the dismay of investors, the apparent success of the gold accumulator was entirely due to the diving skills of Jernegan's accomplice, Charles Fisher. Fisher would swim underwater in a diving suit and salt the mercury with gold.

Jernegan and Fisher fled to France in July, 1898 with over $200,000 before the scam was found out. More→

On 23 June 1987, P. David Herrlinger, a 46-year-old investment adviser working out of Cincinnati, called up the Dow Jones News Service and informed them that he represented a large private investment firm which was about to offer to buy the retailer Dayton Hudson for $6.8 billion. The news immediately triggered a $9 spike in the company's stock price.

The news turned out to be completely bogus. Herrlinger had apparently made the call after suffering a mental breakdown. When his co-workers asked him what he was doing, he replied, "We're going to make some money," and when confronted with the obvious fact that he lacked the financial resources necessary to make a $6.8 billion offer on Dayton Hudson, he commented, "An offer is really an intangible thing."

Herrlinger, through his lawyer, later argued that Dow Jones bore the responsibility for disseminating the fake takeover bid, on the logic that they should never have believed him in the first place. In the aftermath of the hoax, many expressed concern at the ease with which a single irrational individual had been able to manipulate the market.

Disturbing headlines greeted the shareholders of Emulex Corp. on the morning of August 25, 2000: "Emulex Announces Revised Earnings; SEC Launches Investigation Into Accounting Practices. Paul Folino Steps Down As CEO."

The company's stock price responded swiftly to this news, which ran on all the major wire services, sinking from a morning high of $113.06 to a low of $43 by 10:30 a.m.

Emulex shareholders were despondent. But then more news hit the wires: Earnings weren't being restated. The CEO had no intention of leaving. The SEC was conducting no investigation of accounting irregularities. The entire scenario of corporate meltdown spelled out in the earlier press release had been a hoax. More→