Something seemed a little less than ideal about governments and economies around the world in the late 1880s. One woman’s solution? Anarchy.
On one side, a crooked saloon owner with a side business in brothels and opium dens. On the other side, a moralistic tycoon with rail car full of beautiful vegetables. Which one of them did more damage to a frontier town in Montana?
Want to crown yourself the king of Germany? Want to conquer Europe because you have really strong opinions about public transit? Want to get rich quick selling fake government ID cards? With this one completely nonsense legal strategy, you too can claim the government of Germany isn’t real and join the ranks of some very iffy far-right extremists.
To crown the monarch of the United Kingdom, you need a 336-pound block of sandstone. But who really owns that big chunk of stone, and who was the thief who stole it from its rightful place?
If you’re going to accuse a gang of spirit mediums of practicing a banned religion on the down low, you have to prove they’re actually members of that religion. But what if your only understanding of how this religious group worships comes from stories about outrageous magical villains?
A group of spirit mediums found a way to use their psychic prowess to get rich in the physical realm. But when an investigator started looking into a suspiciously successful prosperity scheme, he uncovered a case of divine fraud.
Let’s dive into the dangerous, divine, and occasionally kinky history of trying to figure out who’s telling the truth.
In the second part of our story, the Baron of Arizona has to create a Baroness so he can rise to great heights in Europe and use his connections to keep swindling in America. But while the upper crust in the old country buy into his wild story, Americans are starting to unravel his fraud.
James Reavis was a failed real estate investor, but he had a knack for document forgery. And if you lose all the land you own legally, why not acquire some more with the help of a few doctored papers?
A North Korean plot to sabotage the Olympics and possibly derail a crucial South Korean election hinged on a pair of very unusual spies. When one of the bombers survived after swallowing a cyanide capsule, she told investigators her whole world was a lie.