There's some really incredible scam artists out there, and I mean top tier ones.
And those ones really intrigued me.
One of my favorites is a guy named Victor Lustig.
Well, that's not his real name, but that's the name he was famous for.
This guy was going around scamming people in the early 19 hundreds.
And there was one scam he did where he got $32,000 in Liberty bonds together and went into a bank to trade them in.
And the bank offered him $10,000 in cash and some farmland.
And he took that deal and signed all the paperwork.
But just as he was about to leave, he did some sleight of hand and switched the envelopes and walked out with the cash and the farmland and the Liberty bonds that he walked in with.
The bank did not like this and called the cops on him who caught him in Kansas City.
But he convinced them that if they pressed charges, then this story would get out and it would be terrible for the reputation for the bank.
Customers wouldn't want to use a bank that's this careless with the deals they make.
He was so good at convincing them of this that the bank dropped the charges and gave him $1,000 to not tell anyone and keep the story quiet.
But the most brazen scam that Victor Lustig did was when he went to Paris.
The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1887 World's fair, and some thought it was going to be a temporary structure, and by 1925, it was needing repairs.
Victor leaned into this and called five scrap metal companies to come meet him at a fancy hotel in Paris.
And he said he, he was a deputy director with the french government and even had fancy stationery to prove it.
And he told them that the maintenance of the Eiffel Tower was becoming too high and they were looking for a company to dismantle it and purchase a scrap metal.
But he also said this deal needed to be hidden from the public to avoid controversy.
And one of these companies was eager to take the deal and ended up paying Victor a large sum of money.