20 Ancient Scams That Fooled Victims In Eerily Familiar Ways

In about 1750 BCE, a man called Ea-nāṣir ran a copper trading business in the Sumerian city of Ur. He imported metal from all over the Persian Gulf. A customer named Nanni paid upfront for high-grade copper. But Ea-nāṣir didn’t deliver what had been ordered. Instead, he sent a low-quality product. When Nanni’s messenger complained, he was treated with contempt. Nanni never saw the money again. His angry letter of complaint has survived, carved on a piece of clay found in Ea-nāṣir’s house and now in the British Museum. It is the world’s oldest recorded customer complaint.

Italian immigrant Charles Ponzi ran an investment fraud in Boston following World War I. He promised investors a 50% return in 45 days by buying and redeeming International Reply Coupons, which were cheap postage stamps purchased in Europe and sold for a higher price in the US. In reality, he did not buy many of the coupons at all. Instead, he paid his first investors with money from future investors. Ponzi raised over $20 million by 1920 before the Boston Post broke the story that no investor would ever receive a 50% return. He was eventually convicted and then deported from the country.

Michelangelo was a 20-year-old sculptor working in Florence in 1496 when he carved a marble Sleeping Cupid, treated it with acid, and buried it so that it would look like an excavated Roman statue. A dealer then sold it in Rome as genuine, giving Michelangelo only a fraction of what he charged the buyer. The cardinal who bought it saw through the deception, but was so impressed by Michelangelo’s skill that he invited him to come to Rome and commissioned him to carve his Bacchus. The Sleeping Cupid was eventually destroyed in a fire.

George Parker operated fake real estate businesses in New York City for decades, usually near the ports where immigrants first arrived in the United States. He went after newcomers who didn’t know U.S. property law, claiming ownership of famous landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge. Armed with forged deeds and maps, he sold his version of these properties to the unaware. Police repeatedly had to stop confused buyers from erecting toll gates on the bridge before Parker was finally caught and sentenced to life in prison.

In the 1690s, William Chaloner was London’s most successful counterfeiter. He circulated vast quantities of counterfeit gold guineas and forged banknotes, while at the same time publicly claiming to be a reformer, authoring pamphlets railing against the Royal Mint, and even collecting reward money by framing rival counterfeiters to the authorities. When the mathematician Sir Isaac Newton took over as Warden of the Mint, he was able to bring about Chaloner’s conviction through bribing informants and extracting confessions from prisoners, not through any scientific method. Chaloner was eventually hanged at Tyburn.

The photographer William Mumler charged grieving Civil War families much more than usual for photographs with them and a glowing “ghost” of a dead relative that he created by pre-exposing glass plates with hidden images. Even Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of President Abraham Lincoln, received a photo showing his ghostly apparition. When tried for fraud in New York, with showman P. T. Barnum as a star witness against him, Mumler was acquitted because the prosecution couldn’t establish how he did what he did, but it nonetheless ended his photographic career.

The Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor claimed to be the prince of “Poyais,” a country he had made up entirely on the Central American coast. He published fraudulent guidebooks about Poyais, whose maps depicted a thriving nation with a capital city and even a parliament and cathedral. In London, he made a small fortune selling land grants and bonds. Then several ships full of settlers set sail for the empty and diseased swamp that was Poyais. Most of them died of fever before a rescue could be sent. MacGregor was eventually acquitted of a similar hoax in France, and lived out his life comfortably in Venezuela.

In the early years of the 20th century, Fred Gondorf helped perfect a con called the “Big Store.” Gondorf’s crews rented a real building and staffed a full-blown betting parlor complete with hired actors for clerks, bookies, and gamblers. They conned wealthy marks by convincing them that the gang had secretly tapped the telegraph and knew ahead of time the results of each race. After getting the mark to make several small winning bets, they’d convince him to bet his life savings on the “sure thing.” It became the basis of the movie The Sting.

Hegestratos, a sea captain from Greece, had taken out a bottomry loan, one which would be canceled should the ship sink. His plan was to sell the cargo off in secret at another port, sink the now-empty vessel, and pocket both the loan money and the proceeds of the cargo. However, before he could make it to the other port, passengers and crew members noticed him cutting holes in the hull. Hegestratos leapt into the sea to escape their wrath but soon drowned. This case survives in a courtroom speech by the Athenian orator Demosthenes.

In 1660s London, the lawyer’s clerk John Carleton married a woman named Mary, claiming to be an exiled German princess with vast landholdings, convinced by her forged documents and a convincing foreign accent. It turned out to be all a hoax. She had invented the name, the country, the lands and the title. When she was eventually unmasked, having married another man before Carleton, she was tried for bigamy at the Old Bailey, the central criminal court in London. She was acquitted, but her return to a life of crime ended with her execution at Tyburn in 1673.

A Greek mystic by the name of Alexander of Abonoteichus took what is now Turkey by storm with a snake-god named Glycon, a tame python equipped with a puppet head featuring a set of movable jaws. The priest would strap the snake to his chest and charge worshippers for written questions, which they could drop into a sealable envelope. Then he would open the envelope, read the question, re-seal it, and ask the snake the question. Apparently, the emperor Marcus Aurelius even went to the snake-god for advice during a war. Lucian of Samosata, a satirist, ultimately uncovered the ruse.

An Athenian seer named Onomacritus was contracted by the tyrant Hipparchus to collect the prophecies of the poet Musaeus. Another poet discovered him inserting a bogus prophecy into his collection, and Hipparchus expelled him from Athens. Some time later, however, Onomacritus reconnected with Hipparchus’s exiled relatives and entered the service of the Persian king Xerxes I. He supposedly delivered edited versions of the Musaeus prophecies to encourage Xerxes to attack Greece, according to the Greek historian Herodotus. This was likely just one factor among several in Xerxes’ decision-making.

During the second century CE, an organized crime syndicate run by two men called Gadalias and Saulos worked in the Roman provinces of Judaea and Arabia to forge notary seals, modify receipts for tax payments, and counterfeit documents related to the sale and freeing of slaves, thereby evading state sales taxes and making money from illicit trafficking. When the Romans became aware of this, they captured the duo and put them on trial. The story is told in a Greek-language papyrus trial record, known as P. Cotton, which consists of 133 lines and was translated and published by papyrologists in 2025.

Counterfeiters throughout the Mediterranean created fake silver coins by wrapping a base-metal core, typically copper, lead, or bronze, in a thin layer of real silver and striking it like a real coin. Such coins are called fourrées among coin collectors. Merchants tried to counter the practice by putting notches on coins’ edges, or simply dropping them and listening for the sound they made. A true silver coin would ring differently than a cheap fourrée. Archaeologists continue to find both test-cut coins and fourrées from throughout the ancient world.

Once at the Olympic Games, Eupolus, a boxer from Thessaly, hired three other boxers, one of them the former Olympic champion, Phormio of Halicarnassus, to dive in order to allow him to win the olive-wreath crown. When Olympic officials caught wind of the plot, they fined all four boxers and used the cash to make bronze statues of Zeus, called Zanes, along the walkway into the stadium, each one serving as a warning that victory comes from skill and not bribery.

At temples across ancient Egypt, such as at Saqqara and Abydos, pilgrims could buy mummified cats, ibises, or falcons to present to the gods as gifts. And demand was so great that some sellers stuffed animal-shaped wrappings with a mixture of papyrus scraps, twigs, mud, and scattered bones. CT scans by the Manchester Mummy Project of hundreds of museum mummies have revealed that about a third contain no whole animal.

In 1796, a physician in Connecticut, Elisha Perkins, patented “Metallic Tractors,” two pointed brass-and-iron rods that he claimed would draw out harmful “electrical fluids” from the body and cure ailments such as rheumatism, gout, and inflammation. They sold for 5 guineas, about the price of a month’s labor, and were purchased by George Washington. In 1799, the British physician John Haygarth had some wooden rods painted to resemble Perkins’ tractors and tested their efficacy. He found that they provided the same relief as the real thing, marking one of the first recorded instances of a controlled experiment using placebos.

The Roman politician Crassus’ private team included skilled firefighters and builders who would show up at blazes and refuse to put them out unless the owners agreed to sell them the property at a fraction of its true value. Crassus thus gained possession of a vast number of properties from panicked owners, eventually becoming the largest single owner of real estate in Rome.

The Roman pub at Pompeii was active in 79 CE when the nearby volcano Vesuvius erupted and buried the city in volcanic ash. In those days, people gambled there on a dice game called tesserae with actual cash. Among the excavated bone and ivory dice, some with uneven cuts or little holes with lead weights in them, archaeologists also found honest dice. Cheating was so pervasive that gambling was outlawed except during Saturnalia, a winter festival when the rules were relaxed.

Emperor Pertinax’s elite Praetorian Guard, his personal protection force, murdered him because he tried to enforce better discipline, then sold the whole empire from the parapets of their barracks. A rich senator called Didius Julianus bought the job over his opponent, Titus Flavius Sulpicianus, by promising a vast sum to each guard, and was proclaimed emperor. Without any actual army behind him, and unable to find the money, he saw generals from across the empire heading for Rome within a matter of days. His career lasted 66 days, and the Senate put him to death.

This content was created with the help of AI.