For a while, anyway -- otherwise we wouldn't know about the time when ...

Most scams involve three essential steps: coming up with a somewhat plausible scenario ("I'm a dying businessman in a faraway country"), promising the victim something they want ("I have all these millions to give away") and getting them to give you something in return ("Oh, the bank fee is just 2,000 bucks"). Sometimes, however, the scammers forget the first step and just go with the most transparently bullshit stories ... and somehow still fool everyone.

5 Butcher Pretends to be Wealthy Woman's Dead Son ... and She Believes Him

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The Ridiculous Scam:

Sir Roger Tichborne was the heir to a British fortune who went missing during a trip to South America, along with the entire ship he happened to be standing on. Ten years later, in 1866, Sir Roger's mother still hadn't abandoned the hope that her son might turn up somewhere, so she published a series of ads promising a "most liberal reward" for any information of his whereabouts. That's when Arthur Orton, a broke butcher living in Australia, went up to Lady Tichborn and said, "Yep, that's me. I'm totally your son."

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Left: Sir Roger and his pimp hat. Right: Arthur Orton and an extremely unlucky chair.

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Leaving aside the fact that Orton was the size of like three Sir Rogers, another thing that undermined his blatant attempt to claim a dead man's fortune was his voice: Tichborne grew up in France, meaning he spoke English more or less like Inspector Clouseau, while Orton couldn't understand a word of French and had a thick Cockney accent that was obvious even from his brutally misspelled letters to his "ol' mum." Lady Tichborne took one look at the uneducated, unscrupulous scammer trying to profit from her grief and told him to eat every dick and get lost.

The Success:

Wait, no: She told him, "Welcome back, Roger!" The old lady was so desperate to believe that her son had returned from the dead that, discarding the nearly 200 pounds of evidence standing in front of her, she mistook Orton for the guy she had given birth to. And, of course, once Lady Tichborne declared that this was Sir Roger, other members of the family followed suit.

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"It's him! I'd recognize that nose anywhere!"

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Orton's time as a member of the Tichborne clan would have lasted a lot longer if Lady Tichborne hadn't croaked two years later, sending her heirs (real and pretend) into a long legal battle for her estate. In 1872 Orton lost the case and was prosecuted for perjury after it was determined that he lacked a couple of distinctive body tattoos Sir Roger had (efforts to locate them between the folds of his skin claimed the life of a constable). Still, most of the common classes continued to side with poor "Sir Roger" for years.