People who fooled the world on purpose, and got away with it for years.

Forgers, impostors and one chess-playing machine with a man folded inside it.

• 01

  He sold the Eiffel Tower. Twice.

  Victor Lustig did not forge a document or pick a lock. He arranged for his marks to believe they had been selected — and made sure the victim would be too embarrassed to report it.

  6 min

• 02

  The forger who had to prove he was a forger

  Han van Meegeren sold a fake Vermeer to Hermann Göring. After the war that made him a collaborator facing a treason charge, and his only defence was to confess to the fraud.

  6 min

• 03

  Forty-one years of a skull that never existed

  Piltdown Man was a human cranium and an orangutan jaw, filed and stained. It survived four decades because it told British science exactly what it wanted to hear.

  6 min

• 04

  The chess machine with a man folded inside it

  For eighty-four years an automaton beat the best players in Europe. Everyone could see there was no room for a person in the cabinet, because they were shown that there was not.

  6 min

• 05

  Two girls, a camera, and Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Cottingley fairy photographs were paper cut-outs held up with hatpins. They convinced the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and the girls kept the secret for sixty-six years.

  5 min