Hoax Museum Blog: Con Artists

Crime Never Pays — An accountant fakes cancer in order to avoid a five-month prison term. Gets found out, and is now looking at the possibility of a 50-year term instead.
Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2003.   Comments (0)

Genuine Holy Water from Lourdes — Scam Alert! A company is sending out spam directing people to a website (http://www.0te.com/3) that sells genuine Holy Water from Lourdes. They boast that it's a miracle cure. "Holy Water can save you where medicine failed!" they proclaim. And it's yours for only $39.95. I'm tempted to believe that if you pony up $39.95 they really will send you genuine holy water from Lourdes. That's not the scam. The scam is that you can head on over to lourdeswater.com and buy the same stuff for less than half the price. So this company is tricking people into paying them $39.95 for a product that they then order elsewhere on the web for only $15. That's a nice scam and a quick way to pocket $25. I was curious who the website 0te.com was registered to and checked it out on whois.org. Turns out it's registered to some guy named Mike Richardson who lives in Atlanta, Georgia and works for a company called n26.com that sells teeth-whitening products. That's an odd combination of products: teeth-whiteners and Holy Water. Maybe you can gargle with their overpriced Holy Water after brightening your smile. Thanks to Philip Richmond for giving me a heads up about this holy water scam.
Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003.   Comments (2)

Sucker Day Cancelled — I'm incredibly depressed. Sucker Day has been cancelled this year. That's like cancelling Christmas (well, not quite, but almost). In case you don't know about it, Sucker Day is a celebration held every year in the small town of Wetumka, Oklahoma, usually in the late summer. It commemorates the day in 1950 when the entire town was suckered by the con man J. Bam Morrison. Morrison arrived in town claiming to be the advanceman for a circus that would be arriving on July 24. People would be coming from miles around to attend this circus, he promised, presenting Wetumka merchants with a potential chance to make lots of money. He claimed that if the merchants bought advertising space on the circus grounds, the circus, in return, would buy their supplies exclusively from Wetumka merchants. And he assured everyone that there would be a huge amount of supplies being purchased. Pretty soon all the advertising space was sold (cash paid directly to Morrison, of course), and then, (surprise, surprise) Morrison split town. July 24 arrived without any circus. So the residents of Wetumka, realizing they'd been taken for a ride, decided to hold their own celebration anyway, with a parade and street fair. Thus the tradition of Sucker Day was born, held every year since, until now. I called up the Wetumka Chamber of Commerce to ask why they cancelled it, and the man on the phone said it was due to a lack of sponsorship. But he promised that they'll be holding it again next year, though they're probably going to move it to the early summer. For more info about Sucker Day, check out this Sucker Day Song. Plus, here's the schedule from last year's Sucker Day, as well as a newspaper article about the day (evidently prepared before they cancelled it). If you feel like celebrating your own Sucker Day (perhaps you got suckered somehow this year... lost a bunch of money on a sure-thing investment, or realized your girlfriend/boyfriend was cheating on you), then July 25, this Friday, would be close to the historical anniversary. An appropriate form of celebration would be to drink yourself into a pleasant state of numbness as you dwell on what a sucker you are.
Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2003.   Comments (1)

Death of a Con Artist — David Hampton, the man who conned New York socialites by posing as the son of Sidney Poitier, as well as being the inspiration for the play Six Degrees of Separation, died last month at the age of 39.
Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003.   Comments (0)


Puppy Love — puppy It sounded awful. Five puppies thrown onto the highway from a moving car. Tracy Lloyd claimed that she managed to save one of them, while other motorists scooped up the other four. Turns out the whole tale was bogus. Lloyd wasn't allowed to keep pets in her apartment, so she had made up a sob-story to convince her landlord to bend the rules for her. Her story was exposed when the person who sold the dog to her saw Lloyd telling about the highway incident on tv.
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2003.   Comments (2)

The case of the non-existent child — An Australian woman invented the existence of a child in order to hit up her ex-boyfriend for child support. She even went so far as to provide him with pictures of the (fake) child, and dreamed up a costly medical condition that the kid was suffering from, which she, of course, wanted the boyfriend to pay for.
Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2003.   Comments (0)

A con gone wrong — What happens when criminals cross paths: A man sells a lump of valuable black bronze to a buyer for $64,000. But it turns out the money was counterfeit. No problem. The bronze was fake also.
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2003.   Comments (0)

Mainline Airways — Mainline Airways was attracting lots of customers by offering super-low fares to Hawaii. But it turns out there was no Mainline Airways. Only a website created by a teenager.
Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003.   Comments (0)

Fraud in other words — Check out the website of Larry Adams, CPA. He writes a regular column about the jargon and street slang of fraud. Much of this is shared on his website. For instance, we find there the definition of Fat-Finger Dialing: "Fat finger dialing scams take advantage of customers whose fingers are too large for the tiny buttons on the telephones. For example, a customer might unintentionally dial 1 (800) COLLETC, 1 (800) CULLECT, or 1 (800) CALLECT, instead of 1 (800) COLLECT. Class action lawsuits have been filed against several companies that intentionally own knockoff numbers that are just digits away from popular 1 (800) phone numbers." You can also order his book, Fraud in Other Words, which is a collection of fraud slang and jargon.
Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2003.   Comments (0)

The Kingdom of Mombessa — The adventures of Baron Moncrieffe and the mythical Kingdom of Mombessa. The Baron turns out to be a con man, and the Kingdom doesn't exist.
Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2003.   Comments (0)

The French Rockefeller — Update on the criminal career of Christopher Rocancourt. He recently confessed to having scammed people by posing as a member of the Rockefeller family. Why people would have believed that a Rockefeller would be speaking with a thick French accent, I still can't understand.
Posted: Sat May 31, 2003.   Comments (1)

Nigerian Bank Scam Sendup — Laddery on the High Seas. A funny send-up of the Nigerian Bank Scam, in which a couple of lads string-along a scammer.
Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2002.   Comments (1)

Fake Bank Website — British authorities report that con men set up a website designed to look like that of a major British bank. Users of the website lost around $100,000. This seems very similar to a case that occurred in South Africa last month, which I posted here at the time. I wonder if it's the same group of con men?
Posted: Tue Oct 08, 2002.   Comments (4)

Kevin Mitnick — Red Herring reviews Kevin Mitnick's new book, The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security, in which he details the art of the con during the internet era.
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2002.   Comments (0)

Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2002.   Comments (0)

Michael Gambino Pellegrino — The Sunday Telegraph writes about a recent, literary hoax: the case of Michael "Gambino" Pellegrino, a man who conned Simon and Schuster out of $500,000 by posing as a mafia mobster and selling them a story based on his life experience. It turned out that he was a crook, but was no mobster. (Requires Registration)
Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2002.   Comments (2)

Fake Paraplegic — In Australia a fake paraplegic faces charges of fraud. He walked into the court house unaided, using his fully functioning legs.
Posted: Tue Aug 27, 2002.   Comments (0)

South African Con — South African con artists recently set up a hoax website pretending to be the official website of the South African Reserve Bank. They used it to scam international investors out of thousands of dollars.
Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2002.   Comments (0)

McDonald — I remember when McDonalds was promoting its "Pick your prize Monopoly" game. I tried it and didn't even win a free fries. But this guy walked away with $20 million from games at McDonalds.
Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2002.   Comments (0)

Posted: Sun Jul 21, 2002.   Comments (0)

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