Fakes & Forgeries: True Crime Stories of History's Greatest Deceptions- The Criminals, the Scams and the Victims by Brian Innes

Scams and Deceptions are rife online: Credit Card Scams, people phishing for your personal information by pretending to be this or that site, and who can forget the famous personal letter from a Nigerian Widow of a famous bank manager, who needs your help in transferring her funds to the US? You may laugh or be annoyed by such scams, but the truth is, scams and confidence games go back right to the dawn of history. As long as humans have been human, someone has been trying to trick, fool or cheat someone else out of what they have.

This book covers nine different kinds of fakes, frauds and scams, from faked stamps, faked money, art, papers, books, artifacts, stolen identities and other cons, and then faking for a cause, or faked science. Each chapter of the book covers one or two of these subjects with amazing attention to detail, including how each is perpetrated, and famous examples of each type of fake, and the people who pulled them off.

In the "phony identity" chapter, for example, the cases of Frank Abagnale, the con artist profiled in the film "Catch me if you can" is discussed, along with his many changes in identity and how he was caught. Another story told is that of Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed, along with many who believed she was telling the truth, to be Princess Anastasia of the Romanov dynasty. Unfortunately, the truth didn't come out until after she had died, and it was revealed she was actually an escaped Polish mental patient.

This is a great book that looks at famous and not so famous fakes and forgeries of the world. It can provide hours of interesting reading and plenty of ideas for stories, if you're a writer. But what's most interesting to me was not the cons themselves, but the kind of people who perpetrate them. What leads a person into perpetrating such a crime? Insanity, in the case of Anna Anderson, but what about the people who knowingly go about taking advantage of others? For these reasons and more, I found the book fascinating.