We're often told to fake it 'til we make it. These fraudsters went one step further, reinventing themselves for fame and fortune, with catastrophic results.

Read on to find out what the infamous 'fake heiress' Anna Sorokin (pictured) is doing now, and meet some of history's most infamous impersonators.

All dollar amounts in US dollars.

Russian-born German Anna Sorokin arrived in New York City in 2013. Using the name Anna Delvey, she quickly became a rising star of the elite NYC social scene. The self-proclaimed heiress said she had a $60 million (£54.2m) trust fund and loved sharing snaps of her extravagant lifestyle on Instagram. As a result, the young socialite befriended many prominent figures throughout the city, ruthlessly trying to fake it until she made it... but her luck didn't last forever.

In 2017, Sorokin was arrested for her crimes, but not before she managed to swindle more than $200,000 (£152.9k) out of hotels, banks, and other institutions. And this sum doesn’t even include the money she stole from numerous wealthy friends and associates while pretending to be the fictional German heiress.

At one point, she even forged financial documents, which enabled her to get a $100,000 (£90.4k) overdraft from a bank. Sorokin was just 26 years old by the time she was finally arrested.

Sorokin’s case began to receive widespread attention when journalist Jessica Pressler wrote a feature about the young conwoman for New York Magazine in 2018. Pressler’s story was later adapted into the hit Netflix drama Inventing Anna (pictured), which was released in 2022.

Sorokin reportedly received $320,000 (£289k) from Netflix, although under New York law the money had to be used to compensate her victims. She was released from prison in early 2021 but was taken back into custody after outstaying her visa. But after 18 months in detention, Judge Charles Conroy of the federal immigration court ruled that Sorokin was no longer a danger to the community and released her on the condition she remains under house arrest in her Manhattan apartment, for which she had to provide three months of rent upfront.

Sorokin was also ordered to wear an ankle monitor and to stay off social media. A thoroughly modern con artist, her bold exploits had previously bagged her more than one million followers on Instagram.

Speaking to the New York Times, the fraudster confirmed that the money she used to pay for the apartment is hers but said reporters would "have to ask the government" to find out where it came from. 

In an effort to change her image, Sorokin is reportedly in the process of writing a book, launching a podcast, and has even expressed interest in starting a "salon series" of dinner parties while under house arrest in her East Village apartment. According to an email from her publicist, “each dinner will welcome 10-12 VIP attendees including well-known founders, influencers, media, and celebrity talent friends", focusing on conversation topics such as "social good movements". Speaking to The New York Post, one of Sorokin's representatives said that the dinner series "is not yet confirmed" and is just "one of the many projects Anna currently has in development".

The first two episodes of her podcast The Anna Delvey Show have just premiered, in which she will "dive into the concept of rules and talk to the people who make or break them". The initial episodes featured interviews with the comedian Whitney Cummings and New York musician Julia Cumming, with upcoming episodes to feature actor Julia Fox and model and writer Emily Ratajkowski.

Read on to discover the shocking stories of other people who lived the high life by pretending to be someone else...

As a lowly descendant of the Valois royal family in France via an illegitimate son of King Henry II, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy (pictured) was a scheming social climber, and desperate to improve her position in life.

After her 1780 marriage to Nicolas de la Motte – who himself had somewhat of a dubious claim to nobility – Jeanne began to use the false title of "Comtesse de la Motte". Around 1783 she befriended Cardinal Louis René Édouard de Rohan, a high-ranking diplomat whose unpopularity with Queen Marie Antoinette had thwarted his political ambitions.

Jeanne quickly became his mistress and the self-styled countess convinced Rohan that she was an agent of Marie Antoinette. In a bid to win back the Queen's favour, Rohan began writing her letters, expressing his admiration for her. He received adoring notes back from "Marie Antoinette", which in reality were forgeries written by La Motte and her husband. La Motte even went so far as to arrange a secret midnight meeting between Rohan and Marie Antoinette, boldly disguising a Parisian woman as the French queen.

With Rohan reeled in, the devilish La Motte upped her game, convincing him to buy a diamond necklace on behalf of Marie Antoinette. Boasting 647 flawless diamonds, the show-stopping piece of jewellery (reconstruction pictured) is said to have cost around 1.6 million livres and was reportedly designed for Madame du Barry, the last "chief mistress" of King Louis XV.

It was agreed that Rohan would pay for the jewellery in instalments, and he handed the necklace over to La Motte, believing she would pass it on to the Queen. The necklace was never seen in its entirety again; Jeanne and her husband dismantled it and began selling the diamonds on the black markets across Paris and London.

La Motte’s scheme finally came to light later that year, when Rohan failed to meet a payment instalment and the jewellers went directly to the Queen for the money. Following an investigation, La Motte was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Remarkably, she managed to escape captivity and fled to London. In 1789, she published her memoirs, Mémoires Justificatifs de La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte, in which she protested her innocence. She died in 1791, reportedly after suffering a fall from a hotel room window.

Although she was blissfully ignorant of the scam, Marie Antoinette (pictured) still met a notoriously tragic fate. Renowned for her love of frivolity, her embittered subjects were convinced that she had been complicit in the diamond scheme, even though she was found innocent of any involvement. 

The fiasco came to be known as the "Affair of the Diamond Necklace" and was a minor contributing factor to the anti-monarchy sentiment that fuelled the French Revolution, and Marie Antoinette's grisly execution in 1793. 

Sir Roger Tichborne was the son of a wealthy Hampshire-based family. In the early 1850s, the young aristocrat travelled around South America before securing passage to New York on the Bella in 1854. However, the ship capsized and Tichborne was declared dead the following year.

His mother was overcome with grief and refused to believe that her son was dead. When she heard reports that some passengers had survived the accident and had been picked up by a ship bound for Australia, Lady Tichborne publicly appealed for her son to return home. 

Lady Tichborne got her wish in 1866, when a man going by the name of Thomas Castro (pictured) from Wagga Wagga, Australia arrived in England and claimed to be her long-lost son – and thereby the heir to the Tichborne fortune. Castro claimed he’d been rescued at sea and had sailed to Australia, where he’d started a new life as a butcher and postman.

There were major holes in Castro's story. For one thing, he was shorter and heavier set than Roger Tichborne, with lighter hair. He also spoke no French, despite Tichborne's fluency. However, there was one key piece of evidence that supported his claim: Castro and Tichborne both shared a rare genital malformation.

As a result, Lady Tichborne accepted Castro as her son and set him up in England with money to live on. Other members of the family were less convinced, however, and on Lady Tichborne's death in 1868 they began an investigation.

They came to suspect that Tom Castro was actually Arthur Orton, a London-born man who’d relocated to Australia at the age of 18. A legal trial ensued. Pictured are Roger Tichborne on the left and Arthur Orton on the right; the middle image is a blend of both men's faces. 

The "Tichborne Claimant" controversy became one of the most gripping legal cases of the Victorian era, polarising public opinion. Despite the fact that almost 100 people spoke in support of Orton and his claim, his greatest roadblock was his inability to speak French. 

In 1874, Arthur Orton was convicted of perjury and was handed a 14-year sentence. He spent a decade in jail and died in 1898. Most historians believe that Orton wasn't Tichborne, although some think it could be feasible that the two met in Australia, with Orton assuming the identity of the other man.

While the truth remains unknown, the case still fascinates people over a century later, and in 1998 a movie about the story was released, The Tichborne Claimant, starring Stephen Fry.

The picture shows a scene from the court case.

Born Elizabeth Bigley in Ontario, Canada in 1857, the cunning Cassie Chadwick (pictured) devised her first scam at the tender age of 13 when she wrote a letter that claimed her late uncle had left her a small amount of money in his will. This forged inheritance notification was authentic enough to not arouse the suspicion of the bank and it issued the teenager with cheques, allowing her to spend the money in advance. Her dishonesty was eventually uncovered, and Chadwick was warned to not do it again. 

By 1887, she had relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, where she majorly upped her con game. Using the alias Madame Lydia DeVere, she ran a fortune-telling scam, posing as a clairvoyant to fool the unsuspecting public. During this time, she had also married and accumulated various debts without telling her husband. She was arrested for forgery in 1889 and was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. She was released in 1893. 

She returned to Cleveland under the name of Mrs. Cassie Hoover and in 1897 married a wealthy physician, Dr Leroy Chadwick, who was oblivious to her criminal past. The couple lived together on Euclid Avenue, which was located in Cleveland's coveted "Millionaire’s Row".

It was between 1897 and 1905 that Chadwick pulled off her most sophisticated scam ever. By claiming she was the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (pictured), she was able to borrow large sums of money from banks. She even forged securities and certificates in Carnegie's name to strengthen her story, and claimed that she was set to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars when her "father" died.

With her debts mounting, Chadwick's scheme was eventually uncovered. She fled to New York but was eventually caught and arrested. Andrew Carnegie himself attended her trial, stating that the scandal could have been avoided if anyone had actually bothered to ask him.

Chadwick was convicted on seven counts of conspiracy and jailed, with sources suggesting that her sentence was somewhere between 10 and 14 years. She died behind bars in 1907, aged 50.

It’s believed that many of Chadwick’s fraud victims never came forward, so the exact amount of money she swindled remains unknown. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the most likely figure is $633,000 (£481.9k), which is about $20.4 million (£15.5m) in today’s money.

On 17 July 1918, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alix, and their five children (all pictured) were brutally shot and beaten to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries. The tragic night signified the end of the Romanov dynasty's three-century reign in Russia.

It would be 1991 before the bones of Nicholas, Alix, and three of their children were uncovered in a mass grave in the Ural Mountains. The remains of the other two children were found in 2007 at a nearby site. 

Prior to these grim discoveries, many scammers have stepped forward over the years and claimed to be the missing Romanov children. Arguably the most famous and convincing imposter was Anna Anderson, who said she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II.

It all began in 1920, when a mysterious woman was pulled from Berlin's Landwehr Canal. She was committed to the Dalldorf Asylum under the name "Miss Unknown". Later, the enigmatic girl (pictured) claimed to be Anastasia Romanov and started to go by the name Anna Anderson. 

She said she'd been grabbed by a guard and smuggled across the border to Romania following the murder of her family. She bore a certain resemblance to the lost princess and rumours had long swirled that Anastasia had escaped, so many believed Anderson's story to be true.

Despite being denounced by members of the Romanov family, Anderson had many supporters, including Prince Valdemar of Denmark and Duke George of Leuchtenberg, who both provided her with accommodation. For almost a decade, Anderson travelled between the lavish estates and castles of various Romanov loyalists and relatives as she endeavoured to prove she was the Grand Duchess.

Anna Anderson became Anastasia Manahan when she married an American professor in 1968. She maintained she was Grand Duchess Anastasia (pictured) until her death in 1984, stating in a 1978 interview: "Can you really prove to me who you are? You can believe it or you don’t believe it. It doesn’t matter."

When the remains of the real Anastasia were discovered after Anderson’s death, DNA tests revealed that Anderson wasn't a Romanov. Her true identity? It’s thought that she was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker with a history of mental illness.

Another Romanov imposter was a woman named Marga Boodts (pictured), who claimed she was Grand Duchess Olga, the eldest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II.

According to Boodts, a member of the firing squad known only as "Dimitri K" knocked her unconscious during her family's execution and pretended she was dead, substituting her body with another young girl's corpse. Dimitri K then smuggled her to Vladivostok, then on to China, before she eventually sailed back to Europe, settling in Germany. 

In 1926, she married a German officer named Carlo Boodts and took his surname. The marriage was short-lived, and the couple divorced after just two years, but not before Boodts had confessed to her husband that she was actually the Grand Duchess Olga (the real duchess is pictured here as a child).

Furthermore, she claimed that she’d travelled to the Netherlands and met Kaiser Wilhelm II, who recognised her as Olga. She said the former ruler was providing her with financial support, adding that she’d promised him she wouldn’t reveal her true identity for the sake of her own safety.

However, when Anna Anderson's story began to gain global attention, Boodts also decided to go public with her alleged royal heritage. She set out on a mission to undermine Anderson's credibility while bolstering her own.

Boodts' claim began to gather credibility in the late 1950s, when Prince Sigismund of Prussia (pictured), Duchess Olga's first cousin, publicly recognised her as the lost Romanov princess. He introduced her to Nikolaus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Oldenburg, who would go on to provide her with financial support until his death in 1970.

Prince Sigismund remained convinced that Boodts was the real deal, even telling journalists so. He remained in contact with her until her death in 1976. Of course, when the body of the real Olga was finally uncovered, it was determined that Boodts was nothing more than a wannabe.

Master of forgery Frank William Abagnale Jr. (pictured) devised his first major con at just 16. By using the alias Frank Williams and adding 10 years to his driving licence, he was successfully hired as a Pan American airline pilot.

By the time Abagnale was 18, he’d travelled to 26 countries on over 250 flights, committing fraud in many of the places he visited.

In fact, by the time he was 21, the clever young con man had also successfully passed himself off as a doctor and a lawyer. He pulled off the latter scam by forging a Harvard law degree and even passing the bar exam. 

Abagnale was finally arrested in France at the age of 21 in 1969 when an Air France employee recognised him and called the authorities. 

He spent six months in a French prison and six months behind bars in Sweden before being extradited back to America. There he was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment on numerous counts of forgery. 

However, Abagnale was released early in 1974 under one condition: he’d help the FBI catch other con artists.

For more than four decades now, Abagnale has worked legitimately as a consultant on forgery, embezzlement, and scams, assisting banks, businesses, and even the government. 

His crazy story was even published as the book Catch Me If You Can, which acclaimed director Steven Spielberg turned into a movie in 2002. The young Abagnale was played by none other than Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio, pictured here with Abagnale and Spielberg.

American con artist David Hampton became notorious in the 1980s when he managed to trick several wealthy New Yorkers into believing that he was the son of Academy Award-winning actor Sidney Poitier (pictured). His real father was an attorney from Buffalo, New York, and Hampton had moved to New York City in 1981 when he was 17 years old. 

Hampton first developed his ruse while attempting to gain entry to NYC's infamous Studio 54 nightclub in 1983. After being denied admission, Hampton and his friend claimed to be the sons of actors Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck. As a result, they were welcomed into the exclusive venue and treated like VIPs. 

The experience evidently gave Hampton (pictured) a taste for the good life, and from that point on he began using the identity of "David Poitier" to obtain free meals, money, and accommodation from the New York elite. In fact, the teenage con man was so convincing that he even duped actress Melanie Griffith and fashion designer Calvin Klein into believing he was the offspring of Poitier.

Hampton’s deception came to an end when Osborn Elliott, former Newsweek editor and Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, caught Hampton in his bed with another man. Elliott called the police, who eventually worked out Hampton’s true identity.

After his ruse was busted, Hampton was ordered to pay back around $4,500 (£3.4k) to his victims, which is $13,000 (£9.9k) in today’s money. When he didn’t pay up, he was handed a prison sentence.

Hampton’s case became so infamous that it was adapted into a play called Six Degrees of Separation in 1990. In 1991, Hampton filed an unsuccessful $100 million lawsuit against its creators, asserting that it infringed on the copyright of his story. A movie about Hampton was released two years later, starring Will Smith (pictured). 

Despite his new-found notoriety, Hampton still reportedly continued to con unwitting victims who hadn't heard his story. He died in 2003 from AIDS-related complications. 

Christophe Rocancourt (pictured) was born in 1967 in Honfleur, France to an impoverished family and spent most of his childhood in an orphanage. Despite this, he found himself rubbing shoulders with Hollywood's elite less than two decades later. But his rags-to-riches journey was achieved through cunning criminal means.

Rocancourt committed his first cons under the alias Prince de Galitzine, a fictionalised Russian nobleman. He hit the jackpot when he forged deeds for a building in Paris and sold it for $1.4 million (£1m), and Galitzine was just the first of many faces Rocancourt would wear over the years...

By this point a millionaire, Rocancourt moved to America in 1991. Over the next decade, he invented numerous other fake identities for himself, claiming variously to be a movie producer, a member of the Rockefeller family, a boxing promoter, a venture capitalist, the nephew of designer Oscar de la Renta, and, perhaps most shockingly of all, the secret son of actor Sophia Loren.

He managed to win over Hollywood’s high-rollers by splashing the cash and throwing glamorous parties, fleecing them out of millions of dollars in the process through various scams. 

His high-profile friends included filmmaker Jean-Claude Van Damme and actor Mickey Rourke, who he lived with for a time. He even married and fathered a child with Playboy model Pia Reyes. Rocancourt is pictured here with supermodel Naomi Campbell. 

Following several run-ins with the law over the years, Rocancourt’s crimes finally caught up with him in 2001. He was arrested in Canada and charged with conning an elderly couple out of $100,000 (£76.4k) in a shocking real estate scam. He pleaded guilty, and also to charges from LA of illegal firearm possession and bribery, and further fraud charges from New York. He went on to spend almost five years behind bars and was told to pay back $1.2 million ($2m/£1.5m in today's money) to his various victims.

Given a taste of life in the headlines, Rocancourt took his new-found fame in his stride. He even published a best-selling autobiography titled I, Christopher Rocancourt, Orphan, Playboy, Prisoner, in which he claimed that he’d banked more than $40 million (£30.6m) from various scams over the years.

In the early 1990s, travel agent Alan Conway (pictured) successfully duped numerous people into believing he was the critically acclaimed American film director Stanley Kubrick. Incredibly, the Londoner pulled all this off despite the fact that he didn’t look or sound anything like the New York-born filmmaking legend.

Kubrick, who directed movies including 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, was notoriously reclusive and had withdrawn from the public eye by the 1990s. This helped the appropriately named Conway in his bold scheme and, using Kubrick’s identity, he scammed his way into exclusive nightclubs and backstage areas at theatres.

Conway even managed to convince several high-profile people that he was Kubrick, including renowned New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich. Most impressively of all, he even managed to dupe a Hollywood producer who'd actually met Kubrick in person. 

Conway would make false promises to aspiring actors in order to obtain money and other free goods from them, such as expensive hotel stays. For example, he reportedly tricked Mamma Mia! star Julie Walters (pictured) into believing he was considering her for a movie role.

Conway was eventually exposed in a Vanity Fair article and went on TV to admit his deceit, explaining: "I really did believe I was Stanley Kubrick. I could have carried on until the day I died."

Coincidentally, Conway died in December 1998, just four months before the real Kubrick (pictured) passed away. Despite his elaborate scam, Conway's son told The Guardian that his father had died broke and was in debt. 

Former bartender and salesman Robert Hendy-Freegard (pictured) stole around £1 million ($1.3m) from numerous people over a decade by posing as a British MI5 secret agent.

He would obtain money from his victims, who were mostly women, by pretending to recruit them for the secret service or by convincing them they were IRA targets at risk of being murdered. 

The twisted Hendy-Freegard would even make his victims carry out "loyalty tests", which included lying to the police and being brutally beaten.

Originally Robert Freegard, he legally added Hendy to his name when he started a romance with a victim called Maria Hendy. The manipulative scammer convinced Hendy and her two friends, Sarah Smith and John Atkinson, to go on the run with him to escape IRA terrorists. They then handed money over to him for "witness protection", which he used to fund a life of luxury while the trio remained in hiding. 

Hendy-Freegard was caught in 2003 when Atkinson got in touch with his family. He was found guilty of two counts of kidnapping, 10 of theft, and eight of deception, and in 2005 he was sentenced to life in prison. However, he appealed his kidnapping conviction in 2007 and won. The sinister scammer walked free in 2009. 

In 2022, a Netflix documentary called The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman was released about Hendy-Freegard. The docuseries features the family of Sandra Clifton, who met Hendy-Freegard on a dating site in 2012 and disappeared with him.

The pair were found last year when it was discovered they were living on a dog farm in France. Hendy-Freegard was caught in Belgium months after fleeing French police who came to inspect his farm. In October, he was extradited back to France where he's wanted on suspicion of attempted murder. 

Manipulative UK con woman Emma Golightly was initially jailed in 2007 after scamming numerous people out of a total of £254,000 ($332k), including five men who she had met through personal ads. Entering into romantic relationships with some of her victims, she tricked people into believing she was terminally ill with cancer in a twisted ploy to obtain money.

Even Golightly's own family wasn't safe from her wicked ways, and she was also charged with defrauding her mother, grandmother, and brother. Pictured is a screengrab from the documentary series Con Men Case Files, which explored Emma's story.

Golightly was released from prison in 2008 and immediately returned to her life of crime. She changed her name by deed poll to Emma Charlton and began a relationship with Neil Lupton. She told her new beau she was a wealthy photographer for the renowned fashion magazine Vogue. During her relationship with Lupton, she stole cheques from both him and her grandmother totalling £150,000 ($196k).

In 2009, she told Lupton she was dying from cancer and, as a result, he proposed to her to fulfil Charlton’s "dying wish". She began to plan her dream wedding at the luxurious Slaley Hall Hotel (pictured) in Northumberland, England, boldly informing staff at the venue that she was the editor of Vogue magazine. She paid the deposit for the lavish £80,000 ($104.6k) celebration with a stolen cheque, which bounced.

But of course, Charlton wasn't the internationally revered Vogue editor Anna Wintour (pictured). When her crimes caught up with her and she was arrested in 2009, it was revealed that the money Charlton had stolen had been spent on exotic holidays, shopping sprees, and expensive jewellery. She was sentenced to three years behind bars.

But even another stint in prison wasn’t enough to stop Charlton. Upon her 2012 release, the serial scammer was back at it again, this time using the alias of Amelia Chadwick, a hair salon owner. She told her latest victim, Chris Lashford, that her father was a judge and that there was a £25,000 ($32.7k) bounty on her head.

She managed to cheat Lashford out of £8,000 ($10.5k) before she was arrested and sentenced to another 18 months behind bars.

Between 2015 and 2016, French-Israeli scam artists Gilbert Chikli and Anthony Lasarevitsch swindled more than €55 million ($60m/£45.8m) from numerous wealthy individuals by pretending to be Jean-Yves Le Drian (pictured), a French politician who is currently the country's Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs.

Meetings with the duo's victims would take place over Skype, where the cunning pair would use a custom-made silicone mask to impersonate Le Drian. They even went as far as using a recreation of Le Drian’s ministerial office as their backdrop, complete with the French flag and a portrait of the then-President François Hollande.

According to reports, the scammers contacted more than 150 well-connected figures and organisations, asking for their help in paying fees to hostage takers and anti-terror operations. They approached everyone from King Philippe of Belgium and Gabonese President Ali Bongo to church leaders. The con artists explained that, as France doesn't pay out hostage fees, the donors would need to wire the funds to an untraceable Chinese account. 

It’s thought that the pair chose Le Drian to impersonate as he was previously involved in securing the release of hostages, including Serge Lazarevic (pictured).

Fortunately, in most cases, people didn't fall for the scheme, although one unlucky victim was the royal philanthropist Aga Khan, pictured here with Queen Elizabeth II. He made five transfers to the scammers, totalling €20 million ($21.8m/£16.7m). While three of the payments were frozen, €7.7 million ($8.4m/£6.4m) was never recovered.

The scammers were extradited to France from Ukraine in 2017 and convicted of their crimes. In 2020, Chikli and Lasarevitsch were handed 11- and seven-year prison sentences respectively and ordered to pay €3 million ($3.3m/£2.5m) between them.

Shimon Hayut (pictured) tricked numerous women out of thousands of dollars by posing as "Prince of Diamonds" Simon Leviev on the dating app Tinder. He misled his victims by claiming to be the son of billionaire diamond mogul Lev Leviev when, in reality, he was a con artist running a sophisticated Ponzi scheme.

On matching with women on Tinder, Hayut took them on expensive dates to prove his wealth. This included wining and dining them at top restaurants and flying them around the world on private jets, and he even went so far as to hire people to pose as his business partners, bodyguards, and personal assistant. 

Once Hayut's victims believed they were in an exclusive relationship with him, he’d ask them to take out loans and credit cards in their name so he could protect himself from his powerful "enemies". Having witnessed his seemingly limitless wealth, his victims had no reason to doubt that he’d pay them back. In reality, however, he was using money swindled from previous victims to fund his lavish lifestyle.

Though Hayut was arrested and jailed in Finland in 2015, he was back on Tinder and searching for new targets almost immediately after his 2017 release. He was imprisoned once again in 2019 but served a mere five months behind bars. 

A group of women who were conned by Hayut – Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjöholm, and Ayleen Charlotte – featured in a Netflix documentary that highlighted Hayut’s crimes in a bid to warn other women.

Titled The Tinder Swindler, the hit docuseries aired in early 2022 and claims that Hayut made a staggering $10 million (£7.6m) from his scheme. The women involved have since set up a fundraising page in a bid to pay off their debts, with a crowdfunding target of around $812,000 (£620.5k).

Hayut has been reaping the benefits of his new celebrity status, and is currently accessible via the video messaging app Cameo, where he’s charging people $99 (£84) a time for a personal video message. And that’s not all. The bold Hayut is reportedly charging an eye-watering $20,000 (£15.3k) for club appearances, and his list of demands includes a private jet, two bodyguards, and being put up in a five-star hotel.

But with the real Leviev family now suing Hayut for impersonation in the first of "a number of lawsuits", according to the Levievs' lawyer Guy Ophir, it remains to be seen how long the scammer's luck will last... 

Scheming scammer Anthony Gignac cheated victims out of $8 million (£6.4m) by pretending to be Middle Eastern royalty. For over three decades, he used the alias Prince Khalid al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, even showcasing his lavish lifestyle on Instagram under the username @princedubai_07.

Gignac lived in the exclusive private island neighbourhood of Fisher Island off the coast of Miami. In addition, he owned fast cars, flashy watches, and regularly travelled on yachts and private jets. So there was no reason for anyone to doubt his royal lineage.

Over the years, Gignac used his fake royal status to trick wealthy associates into handing him investment money. His victims believed that he had a significant stake in Saudi Aramco, an oil company controlled by the real Saudi royal family. 

Unfortunately for his victims, Gignac wasn't a Saudi royal, but an orphan born in Colombia who then moved to Michigan after being adopted by a middle-class family.

In 2019, Gignac was sentenced to 18 years behind bars on charges of impersonating a foreign diplomat, aggravated identity theft, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

His story was chronicled in an episode of CNBC’s American Greed titled The Fake Prince’s Royal Scam in 2020.

J. Nicholas Bryant was just 23 years old when he turned to fraud to fund a luxury lifestyle filled with private jets, steak and champagne dinners, limo rides, hotel rooms, and swanky home renovations.

From 2020 to 2021, the resident of Lubbock, Texas defrauded at least 50 victims out of millions of dollars, telling them he was the son of wealthy oil and gas investors. But Bryant wasn't who he said he was – and he certainly didn't have the money to pay for the extravagant goods and services he enjoyed.

Bryant, who was "well on his way to becoming Lubbock's Anna Delvey or Frank Abagnale" according to US attorney Chad E. Meacham, used online payment systems such as QuickBooks to carry out his crimes.

He worked out that the software would send payment confirmations almost immediately, but take several days to notify service providers of payment cancellations. This enabled him to book luxury experiences by convincing his victims that payments were forthcoming, then cancelling the transfers before they were processed but after he'd redeemed the goods. 

Before being caught, Bryant had reportedly managed to charter 17 flights on private jets, book a half-day sailing experience on a 90-foot yacht, obtain five vehicles worth a total of over $500,000 (£425.3k), and carry out more than $980,000 (£833.3k) worth of home and pool renovations. Shockingly, he even persuaded the owner of an oil and gas company to invest $150,000 (£127.7k) in a new oil well that never actually existed. 

Bryant didn't just invent wealthy parents. He also invented a secretary, convincing a private jet company that his fictional employee would process $38,000 (£32.3k) on his behalf to pay for flights from Lubbock to Houston and Houston to Miami, and a number of "fictitious companies" that supposedly employed him. He even made a fake website to lend an "air of legitimacy" to his scam.

But as his victims began to realise that the promised payments would never materialise, Bryant's scheme started to unravel. The scammer pled guilty to wire fraud in November last year and was sentenced to 14 years in jail.

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