If it sounds too good to be true...

They say the key to success is confidence, and today's entries had confidence in spades, more than enough to go around. You see, today's topic is grand hoaxes.

First on our list is Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2^nd Baronet.

This gentleman was a traveler, oriental scholar and linguist. He traveled a great deal in China, and there he discovered the diary of an aid of the Empress Cixi. He translated the journal to English and it became very popular.

Later on in 1915, when the British were running low on guns due to WWI, they asked Sir Edmund to purchase rifles from the Chinese. This he was more than willing to do, and he negotiated a deal worth £2 million, or roughly $340 million in today's money.

However, the British never saw any guns. Ever. There was no deal you see. Every time they inquired as to the whereabouts of the shipment, Sir Edmund had an excuse ready. He even went so far as to forge German diplomatic protests over the deal, which convinced the British that some corrupt Chinese official had to be responsible.

Later on, Sir Edmund went on to scam the Chinese in a fake currency deal which netted him £5600, and he even sold 58000 non-existing books to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He was never held accountable for his misdeeds and died in Beijing in 1944. Oh, and the diary of Empress Cixi's aid? A fake from beginning to end, mostly consisting of Sir Edmund's sexual fantasies.

Second on our list, is the French forger Vrain-Denis Lucas.

Born 1818, this swindler managed to get out of a life of poverty by getting a job at a genealogy firm. The firm made good money finding aristocratic ancestors for people with ambitions. And if they couldn't find any, they made them up. After all, only a few decades earlier the French had sliced off the heads of the nobility en masse, so it wasn't too hard to think up new ex-nobles.

Lucas however wasn't content with this, and quickly found his niche in forging letters from famous people. Like Alexander the Great, Mary Magdalene, and even Cleopatra telling Julius Caesar how lovely Marseilles was back in the day. Never mind that Marseilles was called Massalia in those days. The most staggering fact was that he wrote all these letters with modern ink on modern paper, in modern french. And people bought them!

Lucas was at last arrested and served two years in prison before disappearing from history. As far as we know at least.

The third entry is the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren.

Van Meegeren was arrested and accused of selling priceless paintings to Arch-Nazi Goering in 1945. If found guilty he would have been executed for his heinous crimes.

However, he claimed to be innocent. In fact he was a hero, since he had forged the paintings himself and traded the fakes for real ones in order to save them from Goerings greedy fat fingers.

The court did not believe him. His work was so incredibly skilled, including the use of old canvases and resins to harden the paint. Facing death, he asked to be allowed to prove it. And prove it he did. It took him two years to paint a phony Vermeer in court, but he did it.

In the end, he received a one year sentence, but sadly he died of heart failure after serving only one month.

And to prove Fate has a sense of humor, his forgeries are worth millions today.

Finally we end with Gregor MacGregor.

This evil genius actually invented an entire country in South America in 1822. He called it Poyais. With a creative spirit rivaling any fantasy author today, he created a flag, maps, currency, nobility and more. Then he set out to sell it.

He sold stock and land in this paradise on earth. He had people so convinced of his story, which included his own title as Prince, that he made $6 billion in today's money. Six frikkin' billion of peoples hard earned money!

He even sent seven ships worth of colonists to the fake nation. Many colonists got there only to starve to death or succumb to disease. Finally the dream was unmasked as just that, a dream, and the British Navy managed to intercept the rest of the ships.

MacGregor had fled to France at this point and despite being a multibillionare, set up the same scheme again. This time however the authorities were on to him pretty fast, when people began applying for passports to Poyais.

In the end MacGregor was arrested, but he got out after a few months and fled to Venezuela with his money.

So there you have it. Men with huge self confidence but no morals what so ever.

Until next week.