23 Legendary Con Artists Who Pulled Off the Impossible

General Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish conman who ran the “Poyais Scheme,” in which he convinced the entirety of the UK that he was the head of the (non-existent) paradise-like Kingdom of Poyais, going so far as to write a constitution for Poyais and establish several Poyais embassies in the UK.

A reformed con man named Frank Abagnale successfully impersonated a doctor, airline pilot, lawyer, and teaching assistant during his career as a con artist.

In the 19th century, a con artist named Bertha Heyman conned money out of men by pretending to be a wealthy woman who was unable to access her fortune.

A 23-year-old French con artist named Frédéric Bourdin impersonated and assumed the identity of a 16-year-old missing Texas boy, living with the boy's family for months, despite retaining his French accent and having different colored eyes from the missing teen.

Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter, Master artist, and con-artist forged paintings in the style of Johannes Vermeer, fooling curators for years. Despite his crimes, he is celebrated now as a World War 2 hero for selling counterfeit artwork to Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

In 1806, a con artist named Mary Bateman inscribed "Crist is coming" on chicken eggs before shoving them back up into the chicken. She charged a penny to witness the eggs being laid. Later, Bateman was executed for murder and strips of her skin were sold as charms to ward off evil spirits.

Oskar Daubmann was a con man who convinced people that he was the last POW from World War 1. The parents of the real Oskar Daubmann accepted the impostor as their son, despite his different eye color and lack of known facial scar.

Arthur Furguson was a Scottish con man who “sold” a number of monuments to tourists. In the 1920s, he sold monuments such as Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square (for the sum of £6,000), Big Ben (£1,000 for a down payment), and Buckingham Palace (£2,000 for a down payment) to American tourists. After he immigrated to the US in 1925, he managed to sell the White House to a rancher on the installment plan for yearly payments of $100,000 and tried to sell the Statue of Liberty to a visiting Australian, who went to the police.

In the 1920s, a man went to see a con doctor John Romulus Brinkley for impotence and the doctor joked that surgically inserting goat testicles into his own would cure him. The man begged him to do it and the "surgery" soon became wildly popular, netting Brinkley $750 per operation.

Douglas Berneville-Claye was a con-man who in World War 2 managed to serve in both the British SAS and the Nazi SS.