Con artist Victor Lustig successfully sold the Eiffel Tower to scrap metal dealers in 1925 by convincing them that the city of Paris could no longer afford the monument's upkeep and needed to tear it down.

A closer look

Con artist Victor Lustig successfully sold the Eiffel Tower to scrap metal dealers in 1925 by convincing them that the city of Paris could no longer afford the monument's upkeep and needed to tear it down. The structure was originally built as a temporary exhibit for the 1889 World's Fair and was widely hated by Parisian locals, making his incredibly audacious lie sound perfectly plausible to greedy businessmen looking to score 7,000 tons of premium puddle iron. Lustig forged government stationary, took bribes from the winning bidder, and fled to Vienna with a suitcase full of cash, only to return a month later and try to run the exact same scam a second time. It is a beautiful reminder that no matter how sophisticated modern travel scams seem to be, nothing will ever beat the raw, chaotic energy of literally selling a city's most famous landmark to a gullible tourist