The con man who sold the Eiffel Tower

The story

In 1925, Victor Lustig read a newspaper story about how expensive the Eiffel Tower was to maintain. It gave him an idea.

He hired a forger to make government stationery. Then he invited a small group of scrap metal dealers to a private meeting at an expensive Paris hotel and introduced himself as a senior official from the ministry responsible for the tower.

The city, he told them, had decided to sell the tower for scrap. Because the public would be upset, the deal had to stay secret until it was done. He had chosen them, he said, because of their reputations as honest businessmen.

One dealer, André Poisson, was keen to win. Lustig met him privately, hinted that a government salary did not go very far, and accepted a bribe on top of the payment. Then he left for Austria.

Poisson was too embarrassed to report it, so Lustig came back and tried the same scheme again. This time the police were told, and he fled to the United States.

Why it mattered

Lustig never touched a computer, but his method is the one behind many business scams today: official-looking paperwork, a demand for secrecy, a target made to feel specially chosen, and a victim too embarrassed to report it. That last part is why these scams keep working, because many of them are never reported.

The lesson today

Lustig’s tools are the same ones in business email scams today:

• Authority. A senior title and official-looking documents.
• Secrecy. “Don’t discuss this with anyone yet.”
• A reason to act fast. Other buyers are waiting.

Any request that combines these deserves a call to a known number before money moves.