10 Infamous Con Artists Who Grifted Their Way Into History

Life on the straight and narrow was never in the cards for Elizabeth Bigley, who went by numerous aliases while defrauding banks and deep-pocketed investors through the Northeast and Midwest for more than two decades. Alternately posing as an heiress and a clairvoyant, Bigley first encountered trouble in the 1890s, when she was imprisoned in Ohio for three and a half years for forging checks.

Reappearing in Cleveland at the end of the decade, she married a wealthy widower and proceeded to burn through his money, purchasing expensive clothes, jewelry, and furniture. But a lavish domestic lifestyle wasn’t enough for the grifter, now known as Cassie L. Chadwick. She started a rumor that she was the illegitimate daughter of steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, through which she was able to access loans and cash advances from an increasing number of lenders.

One bank owner smelled something rotten by late 1904, however. Chadwick’s failure to repay the $190,000 promissory note caused the web of lies to collapse. Following a high-profile trial in early 1905 that drew a curious Carnegie out to Cleveland to see the proceedings for himself, she died after less than a year in prison.

An Italian immigrant hustling to make ends meet in Boston, Charles Ponzi founded the Securities Exchange Company in 1919 on the premise that international reply coupons purchased overseas could be redeemed for far greater value in the United States. Promising returns of 50 percent in 45 days, the dapper businessman lured approximately 20,000 investors into paying $10 million, a windfall that enabled him to pay for a mansion and limousine driver. Of course, Ponzi was also using the influx of new investors to pay promised returns to existing ones.

His scheme came crashing down after his ostentatious displays of wealth drew closer scrutiny from journalists and federal investigators. Arrested in August 1920 on 86 counts of mail fraud, Ponzi spent most of the next 14 years behind bars and lived out his final days in poverty in Brazil. Still, he spoke of the excitement of having orchestrated such a successful scheme and might take pride in knowing his name has become permanently attached to “Ponzi scheme” cons.

Related: Bernie Madoff and his famous Ponzi scheme victims

Few tales of high-wire deception are more engaging than that of Frank Abagnale Jr. Starting in the mid-1960s, according to Abagnale’s own account, the 16-year-old “Skywayman” hitched rides all over the globe while disguised as a Pan Am pilot, cashing in some $2.5 million in phony checks along the way. He also claims to have passed himself off as a doctor, an assistant district attorney, and a college professor until finally getting nabbed in France in 1970.

After four years behind bars, a reformed Abagnale began sharing his expertise at the FBI National Academy, churned out a 1980 memoir titled Catch Me If You Can that became a 2002 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, and forged a lucrative career as a security consultant and public speaker.

Or so the story goes. According to Alan C. Logan’s 2020 book The Greatest Hoax on Earth: Catching Truth, While We Can, Abagnale actually operated on a far smaller scale, stealing from just a few families and businesses before getting busted. In other words, the con man’s greatest hoax might have been convincing everyone that he pulled off all the glamorous heists in the first place.

Learn More About Frank Abagnale Jr.

For a while, Lee Israel carved out a successful living as a biographer, even cracking the New York Times bestseller list with her 1980 book on journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. But as it turned out, her talents lay in the impersonation of the literary figures she so admired. For about a year and a half in the early 1990s, Israel composed and sold some 400 letters in the epistolary styles of Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Noël Coward, and others, using the specific vintage typewriter each writer favored. Then, after memorabilia dealers caught wind of her efforts, she turned to stealing the real letters from private collections and replacing them with her carefully constructed duplications.

The FBI finally closed shop on her operation in 1993, though she wound up with a relatively lenient sentence of six months of house arrest and five years of probation. Israel also leveraged her notoriety into one final book deal. Her 2008 memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, later became an Academy Award–nominated movie starring Melissa McCarthy, pictured.

Born Shimon Hayut in Israel, Simon Leviev fled his home country in 2011 to escape theft and forgery charges, only to be imprisoned for two years in Finland for defrauding three women. Hayut later resurfaced in Europe under his new name, allegedly to pass as a son of diamond mogul Lev Leviev, and proceeded to trick several women he met on Tinder into parting with credit card numbers and loans that were never repaid.

Apprehended in Greece in 2019, Leviev was extradited to stand trial in Israel for the 2011 charges—not the estimated $10 million he stole from various girlfriends. He spent just five months behind bars.

His story also earned the Netflix treatment in the form of the 2022 documentary The Tinder Swindler. While the exposure led to his expulsion from dating sites and a lawsuit filed by the Leviev diamond family, Hayut has since signed with a Hollywood agent and wants to appear on his own dating show.

Taking advantage of her internet reach, Amanda Riley used the generosity of friends and neighbors for her own gain. Starting in 2012, Riley began documenting her illness with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and later a form of lung cancer on her blog and social media. Even shaving her head to simulate hair loss, she solicited donations from supporters to help fund her medical care. The problem was it was all a lie: Riley never had cancer, and the money—more than $105,000 in online donations, plus other cash and in-kind offerings—was deposited into her bank accounts.

Riley was convicted of wire fraud in 2021 and sentenced to five years in prison. Doctors have since speculated she might suffer from Münchausen syndrome, a psychological disorder in which someone feigns illness or produces symptoms for attention or sympathy. Her story became the subject of the popular 2023 podcast Scamanda, which has since been adapted into a four-part miniseries now airing on ABC and Hulu.

Where Is Amanda Riley Today?