Paul Maliszewski - Hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters and other great pretendersMaliszewski writes about some of the classic and modern hoaxes. I’m familiar with most of them and actually started the wikipedia pages about many those subjects years ago. He also includes the usual e-mail rumors and hoaxes and the all-time famous Moon hoax of 1835 ( Read more... )

Hilary Spurling - The Grand Therese

How Therese Daurignac, a country girl with pretension to glory, ended up running a prominent salon in Paris? With gall, apparently, she tricked number of people to give her what she had constantly dreamed of ever since she was a girl.
( Therese Humbert and the power of the positive thinking )

Donald B. Smith - Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance: The Glorious Impostor
( Better to be treated as a redskin than a black man )

Hugh Trevor-Roper - Hermit of Peking

Edmund Backhouse wanted people to believe that he was a confidant of Chinese government and lover of poets, politicians and one empress. According to Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper, far from it.
( Conman in the grumbling China )

Emmanuel Carrère - L'Adversaire (The Adversary)
(based on the Finnish translation)

Jean-Claude Romand is a French impostor who fooled his friends and family for almost two decades. When he felt he faced exposure, he killed his parents, his wife and his children and apparently tried to kill himself but survived.
( WHO did not know who he was )

David Sinclair - The Land that Never Was

Plentiful resources all over and cheap labour costs. Profit potential worth millions of dollars. Locals accept investment with open arms. Don't miss this opportunity!Stock investment exhortations? WorldCom marketing spiel? Complicated spam scam? Nothing of the sort but a 19th century scheme to attract ( Read more... )

According to the Museum of the Hoaxes , one impostor fooled four people by merely claiming that he was a rock star. Draw of a nonexistent celebrity?

Partha Chatterjee - A Princely Impostor? - The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal

(2002, Princeton University Press)

( Is this a tale of imposture or of return from the verge of death? )