8 Scammers Who Will Go Down In History, From The Wolf Of Wall Street To A Grifter Who Might Have Inspired Anna Delvey

Taylor was also suspected to be the unidentified woman who posed as a nurse and kidnapped an infant from a Chicago hospital in 1964. Taylor's son later said that Taylor often kidnapped children. While she was investigated for these crimes, she was never convicted. 

Once Taylor was found guilty of fraud, she was sentenced to six years in prison. Upon her release, she married, and was able to collect on her husband's life insurance when he was shot to death.

Taylor's crimes led her to be known as the "Welfare Queen", a title that the Reagan administration capitalized on in their criticism of social programs like welfare and food stamps. This false stereotype is often invoked to this day. 

In the 1960s, Abagnale Jr. began scamming at only 15, using his father's gas credit card to rack up charges, unbeknownst to his family. After he was caught, he was sent to reform school, where he quickly dropped out. Abagnale Jr. then altered his driver's license to appear that he was 10 years older, which he then used to secure a better-paying job. 

Abagnale Jr. soon grew tired of working, and decided he was going to support himself financially by running a bad check scheme. After he overdrew his bank account by thousands, he went into hiding, where he decided that he could continue his con if he had a more impressive personality and story. He decided he was going to impersonate a pilot, because he believed they were highly respected people.

Ferrell got her scamming start as a teen in Salt Lake City. In 2005, at age 17, she began dating Casey Hansen, a 24-year-old she met on Facebook. Hansen later realized that Ferrell lied to him about her age. Ferrell began depositing a series of checks into Hansen's bank account, which she later withdrew for cash. It was revealed that she had withdrawn over $10,600 in bad checks. Ferrell repeated the scam with a series of new boyfriends. 

Brian MaWhinney, another new boyfriend, learned that Ferrell owed her mother and stepfather thousands of dollars, which she wired to them through Western Union. Realizing the money order was fake, Western Union called the cops. Ferrell ended up in jail until MaWhinney posted bail. He later learned that she didn't have a job, nor did she attend the University of Utah as she claimed. She had never even graduated high school.

In 2009, Ferrell pleaded guilty to fraud and forgery. She was sentenced to nine months at Salt Lake City jail. Despite the fact that her crimes totaled over $60,000, her restitution was set at $4,000. Ferrell told The Daily Beast that the only crime she committed was writing bad checks in Utah, and claimed that she did not lie about having cancer. 

Once she was released from prison, Ferrell attempted to scheme her way into the New York social scene once again. In 2016, she pretended she was an entertainment editor for Refinery29 to gain access to a New York Fashion Week event, even showing event organizers a fake letter written on a Refinery29 letterhead to convince them to let her in. 

An episode of Law and Order called "Just A Girl In The World" is based on Ferrell's story.

It wasn't until 1987 that Bakker began to face the consequences for misusing the funds. Jessica Hahn, a former church secretary, revealed that in 1980, she and Bakker had a sexual encounter at a hotel. While she and Bakker had conflicting versions of the story, Bakker paid Hahn $350,000 to keep quiet about the situation. This revelation began to expose other cracks in Bakker's church empire, as people who Bakker trusted revealed some of his other money-making scams.

From 1984 to 1987, Bakker and his ministry sold "lifetime memberships" for $1,000 each. These memberships entitled buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel on the Heritage USA property. While tens of thousands of memberships were sold, only one 500-room hotel was finished, despite the fact that Bakker raised over twice the necessary amount to build the proper number of hotel rooms. It was later revealed that he kept over $3.4 million for his own gain.

The company also sold artifacts they claimed were one-of-a-kind objects that held special powers. These turned out to be cheap, mass-produced trinkets made in China. To add another revenue stream, the company announced that Duval had a new assistant, Patrick Guérin. Soon, people were buying letters from Guérin as well. 

The scam targeted people who were sick, elderly, and lonely, providing them someone to talk to. Many of the victims thought that they had a personal relationship with Duval.

Government officials in the United States first caught onto the scheme in 2004, but the letters continued coming for a decade. By 2014, the Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit, putting a temporary ban on the letters being sent in the United States. 

Before Jordan Belfort became a cult figure, he grew up in Queens, New York, where he was a business-minded teenager. One summer, he and his best friend claimed to have made $20,000 by running an Italian ice stand at the beach. After he graduated from American University, Belfort enrolled in dental school, but dropped out after the dean warned them that dentistry did not have a clear path to financial success.

Once he left dental school, Belfort became a door-to-door meat salesman and was able to grow his business enough that he hired some employees to assist him. By age 25, the business failed, and Belfort filed for bankruptcy. In need of a career change, Belfort turned to stockbroking and was mentored by a family friend. In 1989, he founded Stratton Oakmont, where his scamming career began.

Madoff started his company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, in 1960, at age 22. He first traded penny stocks with money he made as a lifeguard, then was able to persuade family and friends to invest their money with him. When the stock market dipped in 1962, he needed the help of his family to bail him out. Madoff ended up making a name for himself as an alternative to the big, impersonal Wall Street investment banks.

The business finally became successful when Madoff and his brother, Peter, used new technology to gain insight in market activity. By 1980, his firm, along with four other Wall Street banks, were processing over half of all of the transactions made on the New York Stock Exchange. Madoff was making over $100 million a year at this point.

The scheme worked for Madoff for decades. In 2008, as the economy plunged, his clients wanted to cash out. Madoff's accounts dipped and he didn't have enough to pay his clients back. He confessed the fraud to his sons, who both worked for the company. They promised to give their father a week to wrap up loose ends before turning him in, but ended up contacting the FBI immediately after learning about the large-scale fraud.

This wasn't the first time the government had heard about Madoff. In 1999, Harry Markopolos was asked by the firm he worked for, to develop a similar strategy to Madoff's. He quickly found that it was legally and mathematically impossible for Madoff to be getting the returns he was claiming. Markopolos contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission with his findings, but they ignored him. He went back to them three more times with more evidence, but the SEC cleared Madoff every time.