From the 'Tinder Swindler' to a fake German socialite, read on to discover the scammers who lied and cheated their way to the high life, often destroying other people's lives along the way.

Canadian clairvoyant Cassie Chadwick scammed several US banks and businessmen out of over $2 million, or about $56 million in today's money, by claiming she was the illegitimate daughter of industrialist tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Born as Elizabeth Bigley in 1857, at a young age she had cards printed saying "Miss Bigley, heiress to $15,000" and claimed a foreign uncle had left her lots of money. She was later tried for forgery and acquitted on the grounds of insanity.

She moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and went on to set-up and run a scam fortune-telling business as Madame Lydia DeVere and swindled two unsuspecting husbands. In 1890, she was sentenced in Toledo, Ohio to nine years in jail for forgery, but was paroled three years into her sentence. Chadwick returned to Cleveland and married wealthy physician Dr Leroy S. Chadwick and the couple lived together on the "Millionaire's Row" that was the city's Euclid Avenue (pictured).

Chadwick committed her most ambitious con in 1903, when she got her husband's associate, banker Iri Reynolds, to sign a receipt stating that her securities contained a note for $5 million and a trust agreement of $7.5 million, signed by Carnegie. On the back of this, Chadwick was able to borrow millions. But a year later, she was sued over a loan and her promissory notes were shown to be fakes. She was sentenced over conspiracy to misapply bank funds and died in jail two years later.

Conman extraordinaire Frank William Abagnale Jr started posing as a Pan Am airline pilot at the age of just 16, clocking up over a million miles on more than 250 flights to some 26 countries. Over the next few years, he went on to impersonate a doctor and a lawyer, although it is worth noting that the second position wasn't entirely fake – he did pass a bar exam. He also became a master at forging checks.

Abagnale was finally caught in France in 1969, aged just 21. He served six months in a French jail and another six in Sweden before being extradited to the US. Here he was sentenced to another 12 years in a federal jail before being paroled after five years – despite two escape attempts. This was on the condition that Abagnale would help federal authorities identify check forgers.

Abagnale eventually managed to use his skills as a conman to forge a legitimate career as a security consultant, advising banks and businesses on how to avoid fraud. His story was immortalized in a book called Catch Me If You Can, which was turned into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo di Caprio as Abagnale during his years as a Pan Am pilot, both pictured here with the man himself.

Carlos Kaiser was one of the most famous soccer players in Brazil for more than two decades, despite the fact he didn't actually want to play soccer. Born Carlos Henrique Raposo, pictured left, he went by the nickname of "Kaiser" due to his admiration for German star Franz Beckenbauer. But even though he made some of Brazil's most important teams, and was hired out to Mexico and Argentina and spent several years in Europe, fans hardly ever saw him on the pitch.

Kaiser was attracted to the lifestyle and saw it as a way of escaping poverty in Rio de Janeiro. Having started out playing soccer in Mexico, he returned to Brazil and became friends with many top players. In addition to enabling him to live the high life, this reportedly also helped him with recommendations when he moved between clubs – all nine of them. He'd also convince journalists to build up his hype and make extraordinary boasts about his soccer prowess to club execs.

But Kaiser continued to avoid actually playing the game like the plague. He mainly got out of playing by simulating injuries or by saying his grandmother had died, an excuse he used on more than one occasion. He once told The Sun: "Clubs screw so many people over, that someone had to trick them. They couldn’t fire me. All the teams I joined celebrated twice – when I signed and then when I left." His life story was later told in a book and the film Kaiser!

Australian fraudster Peter Foster has described himself as "an international man of mischief", but the charges against him are more serious than his self-styled nickname implies. Aged 20 in 1983, Foster was fined for insurance fraud and has since gone to prison in Australia, the UK, the US, and Vanuatu for his role in a variety of scams.

In the late 80s, Foster sold "slimming tea" and marketed it as an "Ancient Chinese diet secret". He hired the British glamor model Samantha Fox to promote the tea and confessed he "made millions". When regulators tested the drink, however, they found it was hiding another secret: it was standard black tea which Foster was selling for a huge mark-up. He was fined £5,000 in 1988, the equivalent of £13.7k ($18.1k) in 2021. But this didn't stop him from attempting to remarket the shady product in America under the name Chow Low Tea. Again, Foster was found out and fined. He was also ordered to serve his first prison sentence, a four-month stint in a Los Angeles jail. 

Prison was apparently no deterrent. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, Foster was accused of acting as the marketing director of Renuelle, a company that sold slimming pills, and hit headlines when it was revealed that he'd helped Cherie Blair, the wife of Britain's then-prime minister Tony Blair, buy two apartments in Bristol at a heavily discounted price. He met the Blairs through his partner Carole Caplin (pictured), who worked as Cherie's style advisor. 

For almost 40 years, Foster moved between Australia, the UK, the US, and Fiji – scamming people wherever he went. In 2003, an Australian court found that Foster had made around AU$4 million (the equivalent of around $4.2m today) from 70 people who paid up to AU$42,000 each for the right to distribute yet another brand of diet pills. Four years later, he was arrested for entering Vanuatu illegally by boat. He's since been arrested three more times, most recently on 7 December 2021 for taking part in a sports trading scam. Foster was caught in Victoria after spending six months on the run. 

One of the most sinister scams on this list was carried out by Robert Hendy-Freegard, a former bartender who posed as an MI5 agent for over 10 years. Known as 'the puppet master', Hendy-Freegard stole around £1 million ($1.35m) from more than seven victims, most of whom were women. But he didn't just make them hand over money; by pretending to recruit people for UK security service MI5 or claiming they were being pursued by terrorists, he manipulated his victims into leaving their families and carrying out extreme tests of loyalty that included getting beaten up and lying to police. 

Hendy-Freegard was simply known as Robert Freegard before starting a relationship with one of his victims, Maria Hendy, and adding her surname to his. He persuaded Hendy and two of her friends, Sarah Smith and John Atkinson, to go on the run with him, supposedly to escape IRA terrorists. Between them, Smith and Atkinson handed over £700,000 ($950k) for "witness protection." Hendy-Freegard reportedly used this money to finance a luxury lifestyle, buying himself Rolex watches, expensive cars, and trips to Europe while his victims had to remain in hiding.

Henry-Freegard was eventually caught in 2003 after Atkinson decided to get back in touch with his family. The conman was sentenced to life in prison in 2005 but, after appealing the verdict, his sentence was reduced and he was released in 2009. In 2012, he met mother-of-two Sandra Clifton on a dating site, using the name David Hendy. Two years later, the pair disappeared and haven't been heard from since. Clifton's two children feature heavily in a new Netflix series, The Puppet Master, which explores Hendy-Freegard's elaborate scam and the hunt to track him down. 

French confidence trickster Christophe Rocancourt, pictured here with supermodel Naomi Campbell at Cannes in 2008, reportedly made at least $40 million by ripping off the rich and famous. He is perhaps best known for his US scams in the 1990s, when he posed as everything from a French member of the Rockefeller family to a movie producer. Rocancourt also lived off actor Mickey Rourke, fathered a son with a Playboy model, and talked Jean-Claude van Damme into producing a non-existent film.

But the truth caught up with Rocancourt in 2001, when he was arrested in Canada after skipping bail in New York over an unpaid hotel bill. The Frenchman, then posing as a racecar driver, admitted cheating a businessman out of $100,000 and served a year in a Canadian jail before being extradited to the US. Then in 2003, Rocancourt – who also once claimed to be the son of Sophia Loren – was jailed for nearly four years after pleading to US federal fraud charges.

Rocancourt became famous as the "conman of the stars" and even wrote about his life as a scammer in a series of books, including one called I, Christopher Rocancourt, Orphan, Playboy, Prisoner, which is set to be adapted into a film, according to French reports. And his life back in France, where he went after being released in the US, is no less colorful. His name has since popped up in a relation to a series of scandals including a dispute with a film director, a fake document probe and a heist on a French police HQ.

Canoeist John Darwin and his wife Anne became famous after coming up with an elaborate ruse to get out of financial difficulty by faking his death off the north-east coast of England. In 2002, Darwin paddled out to sea and faked a canoeing accident so his grieving wife could claim $280,000 in life insurance payments. After a while, they would start a new life in Panama, leaving their two grown-up sons to mourn their dead father while he hid in a room next door to Anne.

The Darwins' ruse worked for four years and the couple moved to Panama, with John using a passport in a dead baby's name. He then decided to return to the UK after a change in the Panamanian visa laws, walking into a British police station claiming he had amnesia and didn't remember a thing about the previous few years. But the scam was rumbled when a time-stamped photo of him in a Panama estate agents was found online.

Darwin was arrested, charged and eventually jailed for six years and three months after admitting fraud, as well as falsely obtaining a passport. Anne also returned to the UK and was sentenced to 6.5 years in jail on charges of fraud and money laundering. The couple served about half their sentences and later divorced. Darwin reportedly lives in the Philippines with his second wife, while Anne, who is reconciled with her sons, lives in Yorkshire. 

Edward Putman's scam went undetected for years, until authorities became suspicious because the British builder and convicted rapist hadn't declared a lottery win while he had been receiving benefits. However, it was only after the conman was convicted for benefit fraud that the actual fraud finally came to light: Putman had claimed a £2.5 million ($3.3m) jackpot by cashing in a fake lottery ticket.

Putman claimed he had found the winning ticket under a seat in his van in 2009 and cashed it in just before the deadline. However, he conspired with a lottery insider, Giles Knibbs, who worked for lottery operator Camelot in the fraud detection department and knew how to cheat the system. Putman paid Knibbs, who later confessed the fraud and took his own life, a meager £330,000 ($435k) for his part in the scam.

After his win, conman Putman bought two sports cars as well as a house and surrounding land in Hertfordshire, living a millionaire lifestyle while continuing applying for benefits and income support. The criminal faced trial in 2019 and was convicted to nine years behind bars over the lottery fraud in October of that year.

For a whole year fraudster Mark Acklom posed as a Swiss banker and MI6 spy to get his then-girlfriend Carolyn Woods to lend him her life savings to renovate several properties he owned. After promising to marry her and pocketing £300,000 ($350.4k) he disappeared, leaving his fiancé without any money. On the run, the conman changed his name several times, to Marc Ros Rodriguez, George Kennedy and Zac Moss, and soon became one of the most wanted fugitives in the UK.

But this wasn't the first time Acklom had committed serious fraud. The notorious swindler had been jailed twice – the first time when he was only 18. At the start of his criminal career, Acklom stole his father's credit card and posed as a stockbroker to commit fraud. He splashed the money on a mortgage for a house and hiring private jets, much to the shock of his parents, who are pictured here in 1991.

Five years after he had left fiancé Carolyn penniless, Acklom was spotted in Switzerland. He was finally arrested in a luxury apartment in Zurich in 2018, where he had been living under a false name. The conman was married to Maria Yolanda Ros Rodriguez, who was also using aliases, and together the couple had two daughters. The fraudster was extradited to the UK, where he faced trial in the summer of 2019 and pleaded guilty to swindling his ex-girlfriend out of £300,000 ($350.4k). The judge described his scam as "cruel and cynical". He was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison.

Belle Gibson amassed a sizable online following thanks to her wellness content on Instagram, which propelled her to become one of the social media site’s first major influencers. She claimed that she cured her own brain cancer through diet and lifestyle alone and that she had rejected medical interventions such as chemotherapy. The 21-year-old released a wellness app called The Whole Pantry in 2013, which was downloaded more than 200,000 times in its first month and quickly became the top-ranking app on Apple's App Store. The influencer also released a book of the same name, which featured recipes, detox tips and beauty enhancing advice. 

So expansive was Gibson’s empire that she was raking in the cash, with revenue from her book and app estimated to be around AU$420,000 ($329k). Suspicions about her work arose when an Australian publication revealed that profits were not going to charity as Gibson had originally purported, which prompted journalists to dig deeper into what the influencer was really up to…

It turned out that Gibson did not in fact have cancer and had never suffered from the disease, but she did have a history of lying about illnesses that dated back to 2009. Even after the truth was unveiled Gibson was making money from her scam – in 2016 she reportedly received AU$75,000 ($54k) for an exclusive interview with Australian broadcaster Nine for the current affairs show 60 Minutes. During the interview the wellness content creator said she was passionate about avoiding gluten, dairy and coffee, as she recommends in her book, but that she didn’t really understand how cancer works.

In 2017, Gibson was fined AU$410,000 ($314k) for misleading her followers, and in May 2021 authorities started to seize her assets as the fine remained unpaid. Belle Gibson’s story is one that many find highly disturbing, as her wide-reaching influence prompted swaths of people who were actually ill to stop their treatments in an attempt to imitate her fabricated recovery. 

For two years from late 2015, French-Israeli fraudsters Gilbert Chikli and Anthony Lasarevitsch scammed about €80 million ($89m) from wealthy individuals by pretending to be the real French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (pictured). The pair used a silicone mask to impersonate Mr Le Drian, who is now France's foreign minister.

Victims of the bizarre scam thought they were being contacted by the real Mr Le Drian to help pay ransoms for journalists held in the Middle East. As France doesn't pay ransoms, the scammers asked for funds to go into an untraceable Chinese account. It has not been fully explained why they chose to impersonate Mr Le Drian, although it may be because, as defense minister, he was involved in securing the release of hostages such as Serge Lazarevic, with whom he's pictured here.

While some clocked on to the scam before it was too late, others weren't so lucky. Philanthropist and royal Aga Khan IV (pictured here with Queen Elizabeth II) lost as much as €18 million ($19.9m), while over €40 million ($44.3m) was handed over by an unnamed Turkish businessman. After being extradited from Ukraine, Gilbert Chikli and Anthony Lasarevitsch received sentences of 11 and 7 years respectively in March 2020. Between them they were also fined €3 million ($3.6m). Five other accomplices faced lesser charges.

Russia-born German Anna Sorokin fooled New York's elite when she posed as a German heiress called Anna Delvey, who supposedly had a $66 million trust fund. Living a jet-set lifestyle, Sorokin/Delvey stayed at top hotels for months on end, partied with the rich and famous, and took extravagant vacations, documenting her high life on Instagram as @theannadelvey. Sorokin, now 30, successfully kept up her charade for several years by forging financial documents.

Sorokin (pictured right) told friends about her desire to create a $40 million members-only arts center, and attempted to persuade a hedge fund into giving her a $22 million loan to achieve it. While she failed in this particular bid, Sorokin did get one bank to give her a $100,000 overdraft. However, her lies soon began to catch up with her and in July 2017 she was arrested over two unpaid hotel bills and a restaurant tab. The wannabe socialite was then arrested again four months later...

The story started to receive international attention in 2018 when writer Jessica Pressler wrote a feature for New York Magazine about Anna Sorokin's extravagant life and lies as Anna Delvey. Interest was stoked even further due to Sorokin's courtroom antics, as she hired a stylist and once refused to appear because she was unhappy with her outfit. She was convicted of theft of services and grand larceny in 2019 and sentenced to 12 years in jail. She declined a plea deal. On 12 February last year Sorokin was released from prison early for good behavior, after serving just under two years. But her story is not over yet. 

The tale of the phony heiress has been turned into a Netflix series produced by Shonda Rhimes called Inventing Anna, which is set to be released on 11 February. HBO had previously said it was going to create a show based on the story too. Sorokin reportedly received a $320,000 fee from Netflix. However, due to a New York law that stops criminals profiting from their criminality, her accounts were frozen and the money was used to pay back those she conned first, as well as paying off fines, and attorney fees. It's thought that at least $170,000 was used to pay back banks.

And what about Anna Delvey? Sorokin has been posting from her old @theannadelvey Instagram account after her release, and has launched several websites including DelveyMail.com, where it appears she plans to sell clothing, and a blog called Anna Delvey Diaries. She is also reportedly writing a book and making her own film. Her legal team is working on an appeal, but Sorokin is back in custody and likely to be deported back to Germany, although she has indicated she will try to remain in the US.

Known as 'the money doctor', William Neil Gallagher worked as a Texas radio host and controlled the Gallagher Financial Group. As part of his Christian broadcasts, he advertised his financial company – which supposedly offered a retirement plan – to the senior citizens that listened to his shows. He also promoted the business at in-person seminars and in his book Jesus Christ, Money Master. Between 2013 and 2019, he conned more than 190 people out of their retirement savings, netting at least $23 million according to the New York Times. 

Gallagher promised his clients that they would receive a 5-8% return on their investment as part of the Gallagher Financial Group's retirement plan. But instead of investing the funds, Gallagher deposited it all into one account and forged account statements to convince his clients they were making money. His company hadn't been registered with the Texas Securities Commissioner since 2008.

On 27 March 2019, Gallagher, 80, was arrested for fraud. As the extent of his Ponzi scheme has been uncovered, he's since been sentenced to three life sentences for charges including theft of property worth more than $300,000, forgery against the elderly, and exploitation of the elderly. Some of his victims have been forced to sell their homes or go back to work to make up the money that Gallagher stole.

Miami fraudster Anthony Gignac went by the name Prince Khalid al-Saud of Saudi Arabia for over three decades, swindling people out of $8 million by posing as Middle Eastern royalty. He documented his life of luxury on Instagram, under the moniker @princedubai_07 – showing off fast cars, expensive watches and bottles of champagne. Gignac referred to himself as "sultan", "prince" and "his royal highness" and lived in Miami's exclusive Fisher Island.

Gignac used his fake royal persona to convince people to invest in non-existent ventures around the world but in 2017 his scam began to unravel, in part after he was spotted eating pork and bacon – which would normally be a no-go for any Muslim prince. It turned out he was actually born in Colombia before being adopted by a family in the US state of Michigan, and started impersonating a Saudi royal when he was just 17.

In May 2019, Gignac was sentenced by Florida to 18 years and eight months in prison after admitting wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and impersonating a diplomat in 2019. US Attorney Fajardo Orshan said Gignac had sold "false hope" to dozens of unsuspecting investors. Gignac took full responsibility for the operation at his sentencing, but insisted "I am not a monster." In September 2019, a court ruled that the fake sultan must pay back his victims $7 million.

Shimon Hayut has gone by many monikers. Posing as "prince of diamonds" Simon Leviev, and now known as the Tinder Swindler, Hayut defrauded several women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each. He found his targets via the dating app Tinder, hence his nickname, where he claimed to be the billionaire son of Russian-Israeli diamond mogul Lev Leviev.

After matching with women on Tinder, Hayut took them out on expensive dates to convince them of his super-rich status. He even hired people to pose as his business partners, bodyguards and personal assistants. From 2015 to 2019, he targeted women in Finland, Norway, and Denmark, asking his dates to take out loans and credit cards on his behalf so he could "protect himself" from powerful "enemies".

Hayut was initially caught and imprisoned in Finland in 2015, but resumed his scam after being released. He was arrested and jailed again in Israel in 2019, serving just five months of his 15-month sentence. Now, some of the women he defrauded – Cecilie Fjellhoy, Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte – have clubbed together to bring him to justice. They are the focus of The Tinder Swindler, a new true-crime Netflix documentary about Hayut's scam, which claims he made a staggering $10 million. The women have also set up a GoFundMe page to pay off their debts, after losing a combined $812,000. Hayut has criticized their fundraising, writing on Instagram "Go ahead and help real associations.. not these manipulators".

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