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Having successfully scammed hundreds of people, Victor Lustig is one of the most notorious crooks in history. However, this scam arguably exceeds the others by far. On April 12, 1925, the young Czechoslovakian bourgeois succeeded in selling the Iron Lady to a young French scrap dealer.
It all started in March 1925, when Victor Lustig was reading the newspaper. One article indicated that the need for constant repairs to the Eiffel Tower was worth an insane amount of money at the town hall of the capital of France. He thus had the idea of selling the monument, pretending to be a high official and inventing that the town hall had decided to separate from him for financial reasons.
With the help of an accomplice, he invented false papers with the signs of the city of Paris and of the company operating the Eiffel Tower in the header. He then sent a letter to the five richest Parisian scrap dealers to let them know that 7,000 tons of metal from the Iron Lady, which should soon be dismantled, was put on sale.
Finally, the young entrepreneur André Poisson is the one who took the bait. After a quick tour of the monument, he decided to mortgage his house to pay Lustig. He didn’t find out about the scam until a few days later. Unfortunately for him, Lustig had already fled to Vienna with the money. Ashamed, André Poisson did not tell the story.
