The Most Unbelievably Complex Long Cons Ever Perpetrated

There's nothing like a good con game story. Anyone who has moved to the big city can tell you how they were swindled out of a dollar on the subway, or how someone came knocking at their door with a suspicious-sounding sob story. And then there are the long cons, the con games that last for months - or even years. The amount of planning and risk involved in those types of schemes are extraordinary, and you have to be pretty charming and extremely smart to pull them off.

The people behind the biggest swindles are larger-than-life characters. Take the case of a man known as "The Great Imposter," who was able to perform surgery on people after just glancing at a textbook, or the con artist who was able to sell the Eiffel Tower as scrap metal - twice.

These are the stories of some of the greatest con men and women in history. By the time you're done reading, you'll never trust anyone again.

Lou Pearlman gained success after creating the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, but he also spent 20 years getting his friends and family to invest in fake businesses like Trans Continental Airline Travel Services, Inc. Many of the people he scammed were elderly and lost their life savings because of him. He was arrested in 2007, and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Pearlman claimed he was planning to pay the money back. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter from behind bars in 2014, he said, "He [Bernie Madoff] was just a scamster. I don't think it was right, what he did. But I had my way to make it all right. I just didn't have my chance to do it... If I was given a chance to put another band together, that would have paid everybody back. But I never had that opportunity, and that's what was very upsetting."

Frank Abagnale, Jr. was so good at conning people that he made a career out of it. Before getting caught in 1969, Abagnale successfully posed as a doctor, an airline pilot, a college professor, and a lawyer, despite having no training in any of those fields. During the 1960s, he passed about $2.5 million in fake checks all over the world. After spending some time in jail for his crimes, he opened Abagnale & Associates to help companies detect fraud.

His exploits inspired the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.

In July 1918, Russian revolutionaries executed Czar Nicholas II and his family in a basement. Two years later, Anna Anderson emerged, claiming to be the czar's youngest daughter, Anastasia, the heir to the Romanov line. She said that two brothers had carried her out of the basement on the night of the shooting and took her to safety in Romania. Romanov relatives didn't believe her story, but Anderson did gain the support of several prominent people. Her tale served as the inspiration for the 1956 movie Anastasia, starring Ingrid Bergman.

DNA testing performed after Anderson's death in 1984 finally confirmed that her story was false.

In the 1980s, David Hampton figured out a way to con wealthy New Yorkers out of thousands of dollars. He gained their trust and appealed to their desire to be around famous people by claiming that he was the son of actor and director Sidney Poitier. He was eventually arrested, and served 21 months in prison for theft.

His hoax inspired the play Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare, which used many details from his crimes. A film version was made in 1993 starring Will Smith. Hampton tried to sue Guare for $100 million; he lost.

Bernard Madoff is responsible for orchestrating the biggest fraud in U.S. history. He conned more than 1,300 investors out of $65 billion over the course of several years, causing many of his victims to be destroyed financially. He even managed to con some celebrities, including Kevin Bacon and Stephen Spielberg.

Madoff used the tried-and-true Ponzi scheme. He promised investors unusually high returns on their money, and as he gained new investors, he used their money to pay off the old ones so as to seem legitimate. However, Madoff pocketed the extra money himself. He was arrested in 2008, convicted, and sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Christophe Rocancourt started pulling scams in France, posing as a nobleman named Prince de Galitzine. By faking the deeds to a property he didn't own, he was able to sell it for $1.4 million. He then came to the U.S. in 1991, and posed as a movie producer and ex-boxing champion. Rocancourt also claimed to be related to the Rockefeller family and Sophia Loren.

In 2002, Rocancourt was fined $9 million for his crimes, and was ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution to his victims. After getting released from prison, he used his infamy to keep hanging out with celebrities in France. He was arrested in 2014 for trying to obtain fake visas and passports to sell to people.

Ferdinand Demara was born in 1921, but every story about his life after that might be made up. Armed with a high I.Q., a photographic memory, and plenty of nerve, he used a series of stolen identities to impersonate a number of individuals. Over the years, "The Great Imposter" worked as a zoologist, a civil engineer, a Trappist and a Benedictine monk, and a prison warden, among many other positions.

Demara's fall came during the Korean War. He was posing as a doctor on a Royal Canadian Navy Destroyer, and several wounded men were brought onboard. Called upon to tend their injuries, Demara briefly glanced at a textbook and started performing life-saving surgeries. News of his heroism spread - and people began realizing he was a fraud. Demara was too famous to continue his activities after that.

Victor Lustig managed to pull several cons in his life, but he's best known for selling the Eiffel Tower as scrap metal to unsuspecting dealers. In 1925, he noticed an article debating whether the Eiffel Tower should be repaired or sold, and decided to sell it to metal dealers himself. Using a fake government title, he met with several dealers and told them the tower had become too expensive to repair. One dealer, Andre Poisson, fell for the scheme and handed over a check. Lustig cashed it and disappeared, but Poisson was too embarrassed to report the incident to the police.

When Lustig realized he wasn't being pursued, he went back to Paris and pulled the same con a second time. This would-be investor reported Lustig, and he fled to America. He was later arrested on different charges.

In a truly disturbing case of deception, Frédéric Bourdin persuaded police in 1997 that he was Nicholas Barclay, a 16-year-old boy from Texas who had been missing for three years. Nicholas's family took Bourdin into their home, believing that he was their lost child - even though his eyes were the wrong color, he was 23 years old, and he spoke with a French accent. Was he able to charm them, or did they just accept him because they knew Nicholas was never coming home?

After three months, a private investigator confirmed that Bourdin was not Nicholas after all. Instead, he was a con man known in France as "The Chameleon," who specialized in assuming the identities of missing individuals. This chilling case was explored in the 2012 documentary The Imposter.

You've probably heard of a Ponzi Scheme before, but you may not know that it was invented by Italian immigrant Charles Ponzi in the early 1900s. He arrived in America without much money, but that all changed when he set up a business called the "Securities Exchange Company." Ponzi offered investments that would pay back 100% interest on the original investment after 90 days. However, he never actually invested money for anyone - he was using one investor's cash to pay off another investor, and so on.

Ponzi was able to keep up the illusion for about two years before being caught. At one point, he was reportedly raking in $250,000 a day.