In 1925, a newspaper in Paris published news about the rusty Eiffel Tower and the high cost of maintenance and repair.
Built in 1889 in anticipation of the Paris World's Fair, the behemoth has long passed its expected useful life, and many felt it was time to tear down the ugly tower.
After seeing this news, the bohemian Viktor Tislag had a bold idea in his mind——— sell the Eiffel Tower as scrap iron.
So Victor began to learn about the Eiffel Iron Tower, and soon the clever bohemian became an expert on the Eiffel Tower.
Then, he found someone to start spreading the Eiffel Tower, sending people to pretend to be demolition teams, and went in and out of the neighborhood, making French public opinion gush.
Later, Victor disguised himself as the deputy head of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of French Polynesia, sent forged letterheads to the largest scrap metal buyers in Paris, pretending that the maintenance of the tower was expensive, and the French government did not want to continue repairing, and invited six scrap buyers to the most exclusive hotel in Paris, "The Hotel Crelon", to negotiate the acquisition deal.
At the meeting, Victor told the businessmen that the French government was ready to tear down the Eiffel Tower because it was considered useless and cost a lot of money to repair, and cited the famous "Against the Construction of the Eiffel Tower" protest to convince the businessmen that he was telling the truth.
He hinted to these merchants that there would be about seven thousand tons of scrap iron after the demolition of the Eiffel Tower, and if the scrap iron merchants throughout Paris knew about it, there would be fierce competition, so they must keep it secret.
After the discussion, Victor began to suggest that the steelman gave him gifts, and the steelman Andre Borison was Victor's target of fraud.
Borison completely fell into Victor's trap after a conversation with Victor. So, after sending the fake deputy director 20,000 US dollars in cash, he also promised an additional thank you of 50,000 yuan if Victor could secretly guarantee him to win the bid.
After receiving the seventy thousand dollars, Victor immediately fled to Austria by train. However, in the weeks that followed, nothing was reported.
It turned out that Borison was afraid that once the matter was announced, he would put himself in a great embarrassment, so he chose to swallow his anger.
Victor saw that everything was calm, and soon returned to Paris, intending to repeat the old trick and sell the Eiffel Tower as scrap steel again. However, the usually cautious Victor noticed that some of the new scrap buyers seemed to have notified the police, so he fled to the United States.
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Victor Rastig
Born in Bohemia in 1890, he is a funny and charismatic man who is fluent in many languages. Considered the most confident and talented liar, he once roamed Europe with his ingenious and peculiar scams, then fled to the United States to continue his fraud, and was captured by the US Secret Service in 1935 and died in prison.
In addition to the "Eiffel Tower scam", Victor had a classic "gold box" scam in his early years:
Savings Box scam
When he was young, Victor once lamented: If you want to make money quickly, where can you compare to the ocean liner full of rich people?
As a result, Victor began to appear on liners between Paris and New York. At first, he chatted with the ship's merchants, looking for potential scam targets.
After getting acquainted, he began to casually mention the source of his wealth and revealed to the other party that he was using the "savings box". The merchants wondered what kind of machine it was, and expressed their hope to see it.
Victor feigned reluctance, but eventually agreed to show the merchants the new invention in private. The "gold box" is carefully made of mahogany and contains seemingly sophisticated printing devices.
Subsequently, Victor demonstrated the use of the "gold deposit box" live, inserted a genuine 100-dollar bill into the box, and after 6 hours of "chemical processing", he took out two seemingly realistic 100-dollar bills.
As a result, businessmen asked how they could also have a "gold box", and Victor endured the pain and sold the "gold box" for a high price of $30,000.
However, the machine only produced 2 hundred dollar bills in the next 12 hours. When the merchants reacted, Victor had already fled.
