As long as history has been recorded there have been endless schemes and scams to relieve the gullible and the innocent of their finances.
The world is full of examples of scams that are caught, exposed and quickly stamped out, only to pop-up in a nearby place like a never ending Wack-a-mole game.
It doesn’t seem to matter how many investigative news shows and 20/20 type documentaries are aired, the lineup of people looking for a quick buck or an “angle” seems endless, and as long as there are people with a something-for-nothing bent, they will always be accommodated.
Although you would be hard pressed to find people who haven’t heard of pyramid schemes, the Nigerian swindle, or the ubiquitous work-at-home Internet scams, it seems that many people have an inability to connect the dots to the latest publicized fraud and the too-good-to-be-true deal they’ve just discovered.
These everyday shenanigans are what they are, but every once in a while a true masterpiece of larceny will surface like a Rembrandt or a Monet.
The Sale of the Eiffel Tower
One of the greatest con masters of all time was “Count” Victor Lustig. Lustig was born in 1890 in Czechoslovakia to a middle class family. Through a series of happenstance and events, Lustig gravitated towards the seedier side of life and discovered that he had an enormous talent for games of chance and for bluffing in general. A life of crime seemed an eminent fit.
Calling himself “Count” was just one of his dozens of aliases. He spoke five languages fluently with an uncanny ability to dupe a “mark” in any one of the five.
We’ve all heard the common expression about selling the Brooklyn Bridge which has become a part of American lexicon as the metaphor for the ultimate in gullibility or salesmanship.
The “Count” was the consummate salesman, he actually sold the Eiffel Tower.
In 1925, Lustig read in a French newspaper that the Eiffel Tower needed major repairs. The article immediately gave him an idea. Posing as “France’s Minister of Public Buildings,” he contacted five of the country’s largest scrap metal dealers and brought them together for a face-to-face meeting at a Parisian hotel.
Count Lustig welcomed the scrap-metal merchants to his suite and explained; “Gentlemen, as France’s Minister for Public Buildings, it saddens me to have to say that our beloved Eiffel Tower has to be dismantled and sold. The French government has concluded that the cost of its maintenance and preservation has gotten out of hand.” He further added that the Eiffel Tower had been built for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and was never intended to be a permanent site. Now that it was in such a state of disrepair, the government had concluded that it was best to recover what they could and dismantle it forever.
Lustig then took the men to the tower for an “official” inspection. As the men began to see the profit potential in the all the prefabricated parts, Lustig urged them on. As a master salesmen, he let the five merchants talk and talk until he knew their motives and deepest desires.
Back at the hotel, Lustig continued with his presentation. The tower itself will yield no less than 7,000 tons of high-grade iron, advised Lustig, and as you men are in the business, you can see an enormous profit potential. I invite you to deliver your sealed bids to me within the next twenty-four hours.
When one of the dealers asked why the negotiations were in a hotel rather than at the Ministry, Lustig admitted that the public would be furious when it learned of the government’s decision to dismantle their beloved tower, so he asked them for total secrecy until the demolition actually began.
In reality, Lustig didn’t need to see the other four bids, he already knew he would accept the offer from André Poisson. That was his mark.
Within several days, and as “luck” would have it for Poisson, Lustig personally informed him that his was the “winning” bid. No sooner had Poisson been informed of his victory when doubts of the veracity of the whole affair began to set in. His wife sensed the entire affair was sketchy. There was far too much secrecy and haste for her liking.
So when Poisson met Lustig at his hotel suite and suggested that he needed a little more time to think things through, Lustig’s true genius and uncanny knowledge of human behavior kicked in.
Lustig then asked his secretary to leave the room. As soon as the two men were alone Lustig quietly admitted that even though he was a government official, he still expected a kick-back for his efforts. After all, he confided, he did bend the rules and chose Poisson’s bid over the others as a personal favor, even though it wasn’t the highest bid.
Lustig knew that Poisson desperately wanted to get into the inner circles of the Parisian business community, and that obtaining the deed to the Eiffel Tower would be just the ticket to the upper echelons. He would gain the status he sought and make a quick killing on the business end of things. It was simply a deal that was too good to pass up.
If a little larceny likes company, Lustig’s admission of corruption was all Poisson needed to hear. In his mind the entire lot of Parisian bureaucrats were crooks, so upon hearing of Lustig’s depravity he was certain the deal had to be authentic.
Within forty-eight hours Poisson had raised the money and handed Lustig two certified checks. One was for the deed of sale and the other was a “little something” for Lustig’s efforts.
Within an hour Lustig had cashed the checks and he and his ‘secretary’ were riding first class to Vienna with a suitcase full of cash.
When Poisson found out shortly thereafter that he had been scammed, he never said a word. He was just too embarrassed to report it.
The 100% Guaranteed Potato Bug Solution
I particularly love the next story, because it’s so much closer to home, and as scams go this one to was a real beauty.
While growing up I must have heard the story about the “guaranteed potato bug solution” a few dozen times.
My father was raised on an agricultural farm during the late 30s and early 40s. They had a large variety of crops, which included an assortment of fruits and vegetables. A nice selection of crops inevitably attracts the usual suspects. In this case it was the hated and feared potato beetle. If you thought that the third and fourth plagues of gnats and flies that Moses, Pharaoh and the Egyptians suffered through were horrific, that was a mere nuisance compared to the voracious potato beetle! A farmer could go to bed at dusk with a perfectly healthy crop and wake up to see his field stripped of leaves before breakfast.
What makes the potato beetle so devastating is its proliferation and unmatched ability to develop resistance to virtually every chemical that’s been used against it.
The local fruit and vegetable distributor was the life-blood of the community, for it was here that the neighboring farmers would gather to purchase fertilizer, seed, and the necessary range of equipment from ladders to tractors. It was the perfect place to trade stories, tell hard luck tales, gossip and to discuss methods of combating the potato scourge. As the suggestions, laments and woes of impending doom were being lobbed about, one of the farmers noted a small advertisement in the Farmer’s Almanac. The ad claimed to have documented proof that this solution offered a 100% success rate in killing the pesky potato beetle. The ad said something to the effect that if you mailed $1.15 in either cash or a teller’s check to The Beetle Bug Solution at the address listed below, you would be given the “secret weapon” that killed this scourge every time and without fail. It guaranteed that no potato beetle has ever, or could ever, survive this ingenious weapon. It was further promised that the solution would be mailed the very day your money arrived and of course this assurance was backed with an iron-clad money-back guarantee.
Well, there was immediate skepticism to such a claim, but as these things are prone to do, the offer proved irresistible. After all, as one farmer pointed out, “What do we have to lose? If it doesn’t work we’re guaranteed our money back.” That line of logic seemed to hold up under the weight of analysis as the farmers went their various ways.
The following day the neighborhood postman collected a satchel full of envelopes addressed to The Beetle Bug Solution. Well it wasn’t two weeks later that the guaranteed solutions were delivered. When the anxious recipients tore open their packages it was a sight to behold. There in the little brown envelope was the secret weapon. They found two small blocks of wood and the typed instructions for their exact use. The instructions were short, succinct, and elegantly simple to follow. They read:
To kill the potato beetle, place it on one of the blocks of wood, and before it can escape, smash down hard on it with the other block. It works every time!
As you can imagine, it took some time for the story to come out since no one wanted to admit they had been duped by such an obvious con. But eventually such a beautiful swindle had to be accepted for what it was, and the locals had a good laugh at their own expense.
When someone suggested that “Something ought to be done about this kind of larceny and that the lying cheat who sold this malarkey should be locked up for a thousand years,” an old wag elegantly pointed out, “The ad, the materials and the instructions did exactly as they promised!”
That of course brings us back to the beginning. The time, the place, or the situation, matters not – if it sounds too good to be true … proceed with extreme caution.
