The Most Famous Female Swindlers

The setup was almost always the same. There was wealth that could not be seen right then: a locked safe, a distant relative, a disputed will. Loans were taken out against it. New loans paid off old ones, and the whole structure held together as long as no one demanded that the safe be opened.

The story could always have been checked. People did not check for social reasons: doubt would have seemed insulting, while creditors who had already invested were afraid to admit their mistake and kept investing. The more people believed it, the more convincing the story seemed to the next person.

Notice the role of publicity. In both cases, rumors worked in favor of the scam: the more people discussed the mysterious inheritance, the fewer wanted to look like the only skeptic. Shared knowledge took the place of proof.

Newspapers of the time wrote about such cases not as financial schemes, but as character studies: they discussed appearance, manners, marital status, and "female cunning." The method itself was left out, even though it was the interesting part.

The bias lasted a long time. A male swindler is described through the scheme, while a woman is described through her personality. That made analysis of such cases worse: to protect yourself from a repeat, you need to know how the deception works, not the details of someone's biography.