14 Incredible Deceptions That Actually Happened

Gutsy scams and elaborate hoaxes that took place in history.

Published 10 years ago in Wtf

Gutsy scams and elaborate hoaxes that took place in history.

1
In 1906, a German shoemaker, Wilhelm Voigt, impersonated a military officer and tricked a group of soldiers into helping him rob a small town. The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II thought it was so funny that he personally pardoned Voigt.

2
In the 1700s, a woman named Mary Toft in England tricked doctors into thinking she could give birth to rabbits. Sometime later she admitted that she shoved dead rabbits into her vagina before ‘birthing’ them.

3
In 2004, a German hacker named Axel Gembe stole the source code for Half Life 2. Gabe Newell, the managing director of the company then tricked him into thinking Valve wanted to hire him as an “in-house security auditor.” He was given plane tickets to the USA and was to be arrested on arrival by the FBI. German government became aware of his plan and he was arrested in Germany and put on trial there.
4
Between 1932 and 1972, the US government tricked around 600 black citizens from Alabama into believing that they were receiving free healthcare. They were actually test subjects to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis.

5
In 1968, a car driven by Japanese bank employees was pulled over by a motorcycle cop claiming that the car had been rigged with a bomb. The cop got under the car to “defuse” the device. When the car started to smoke, everybody ran. Then the “cop” just drove the car away. This 300 million Yen robbery still remains unsolved.
6
Someone tricked a Nigerian scammer into hand writing an entire Harry Potter novel, the whole 293 pages and scanned with a scan width of 1200 pixel. They told them that they are too busy with writing down printed books by hand to help the scammer, and offered to pay him $100 per page if he was willing to work for them.
7
The reverse scam on the Nigerian spammer was topped by someone else tricking a different group of Nigerian email scammers into recreating Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch.

8
From 1946-1953, Quaker Oates and MIT conducted an experiment on unsuspecting, mentally retarded children. They tricked them into eating radioactive cereal by telling them they were in a “science club.”
9
In 1998, a Japanese comedian was tricked into a real-life “Truman show” when he accepted a job which (unbeknownst to him) would lock him into an apartment, naked and cut off from everything and film him, without his knowledge.
10
The inventor of the Brazen Bull, Perilaus of Athen’s, was tricked into being the first victim of his sadistic execution device.

11
A man protested against the 1956 Olympic torch relay by carrying a fake flame, consisting of a pair of underpants set on fire in a plum pudding can, attached to a chair leg. He tricked onlookers and even handed it to the Mayor of Sydney, Pat Hills before escaping without being noticed.
12
Even after his men cheated and stole from a Jamaican tribe, Christopher Columbus tricked Native Jamaicans into providing provisions by correctly predicting a lunar eclipse.
13
In 1985, In California, a guy claiming to be a doctor successfully tricked a girl into bed (and out of $1000) by claiming that he can give her a vaccine for a ‘fatal disease that she had contracted’ by having sex with her.