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The largest Ponzi scheme in world history -

In a case that shook world stock markets to their core, investment adviser and financier Bernie Madoff confessed to the largest Ponzi scheme in world history, and the largest financial fraud in US history. Madoff's criminal activities defrauded thousands of investors of billions of dollars. In 2009, the disgraced financier was sentenced to 150 years in prison, where he died in April 2021.

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"Unsinkable!" - When RMS Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911, shipbuilders Harland and Wollf never claimed the liner was unsinkable. However, when White Star Line officials were informed that the liner was in trouble after striking an iceberg on April 15, 1912, during her maiden voyage, White Star Line Vice President P.A.S. Franklin allegedly announced: "We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe the boat is unsinkable." More than 1,500 people died when the ship eventually went under.

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Trojan horse -

One of Antiquity’s most enduring myths is the story about the subterfuge that the Greeks used to enter Troy. They built a huge wooden horse and hid a select force of men inside. The Trojans, believing it was a victory trophy left by their defeated foe, pulled the horse into their city. After dark, the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek Army. Today, a malicious computer program that tricks users into running it is called a "Trojan horse."

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Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) -

The United States, joined by the United Kingdom and several coalition forces, invaded Iraq in 2003 in the supposed belief that the country, led by Saddam Hussein, possessed an active weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) program. No stockpiles of WMDs or an active WMD program were ever found in Iraq.

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The Berlin Wall -

"Nobody has the intention of building a wall," insisted East German head of state Walter Ulbricht in June 1961. Two months later, work began on what was to become the Berlin Wall. It stood as a symbol of division and oppression until finally being torn down in 1989.

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Royal look-alike -

Anna Anderson (pictured) claimed she was Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the Romanov family (Russian tsar Nicholas II, the empress, and their five children), who were executed in 1918 by Bolshevik revolutionaries. In 1921, the Anastasia look-alike was admitted to a hospital, where she claimed she was the daughter who escaped the massacre. In 1938, she filed an unsuccessful suit to try and prove her identity. She died in 1984. The Romanov family remains were eventually located and DNA taken. None matched Anderson’s, who herself was later identified as a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.

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Paul McCartney is dead! -

An urban legend surfaced in 1966 alleging that Paul McCartney had died in November of that year and had been replaced by a dopplegänger. The rumor was further fueled in 1969 when 'Abbey Road' was released: the album cover shows the Beatle barefoot and out of step with the rest of his band mates— an image supposedly representing a corpse—while the number plate of the VW in the photo contains the characters LMW 28IF, with "28IF" indicating McCartney’s age "if" he had still been alive.

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Swindler -

Notorious Italian swindler and con artist Charles Ponzi is forever identified with a fraudulent scheme that still endures. The architect of a 1919 pyramid scheme built around the buying and selling of international reply coupons, he conned investors into sending him millions of dollars by promising eye-watering returns. In reality, Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors.

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Read our lips -

German R&B duo Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, who performed as Milli Vanilli in the late 1980s and early '90s, achieved music industry infamy when it was revealed that they did not sing any of the vocals heard in their music releases. Their ruse unfolded during a live MTV performance when the pair were caught lip-syncing to the song 'Girl You Know It’s True.'

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Hit for six -

In a scandal that still reverberates today in the world of sport, several members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team accepted a bribe to lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, with as much as US$100,000 (around US$1.5 million today) changing hands.

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Trumped! -

Donald Trump kept fact-checkers busy after he took office in January 2017. For example, he claimed he had up to 1.5 million people in attendance for his inauguration, making it "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period." This figure turned out to be a vast overestimate.

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J’Accuse…! -

Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army in the late 19^th century, was accused of selling military secrets to Germany. Found guilty, Dreyfus was imprisoned for five years on Devil's Island. It was later revealed the accusation was based on a lie perpetrated by French Army major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The case divided France, with novelist Émile Zola accusing the army of a vast cover-up.

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"Great Moon Hoax" -

A series of six articles published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 15, 1835, suggested weird bat-like creatures had been discovered on the Moon. The paper claimed that eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel was the source. Richard Locke, a reporter working for the paper, later admitted to the hoax.

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Loch Ness Monster -

In 1934, a photograph of the so-called Loch Ness Monster published in the Daily Mail had much of the United Kingdom believing that a prehistoric creature lurked in the dark depths of one of Scotland’s most scenic lakes. But it was a clever hoax. The "monster" was nothing more than a toy submarine with a head and neck made from wood putty.

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Clinton and Lewinsky -

"I did not have relations with that woman," insisted Bill Clinton in 1998. However, the discovery of his DNA in a stain on intern Monica Lewinsky’s dress proved to be the president’s comeuppance.

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Piltdown Man -

In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward, a geologist at the British Natural History Museum in London, announced the unearthing of the remains of skull fragments and a jawbone of a previously unknown early human from a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. Dawson claimed he had found the "missing link" between ape and man. In fact, the bones were stained to resemble ancient fossils, and the teeth, probably from an orangutan or chimpanzee, were filed down to appear human.

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Downhill career -

A cancer survivor and hero to many, American road racing cyclist Lance Armstrong became the subject of persistent doping allegations after winning the 1999 Tour de France. For years he denied any involvement in doping. But in 2013, he confessed. As a result, he was stripped of all his achievements from August 1998 onwards, including his seven Tour de France titles.

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Enigma and the Ultra Team -

In June 1941, British mathematician Alan Turing cracked the Nazi Enigma code, which had been used to coordinate German U-boat attacks on vulnerable Allied North Atlantic shipping convoys. From then on, Ultra, the top-secret Allied intelligence project, fed the unsuspecting Germans a slew of disinformation to keep the enemy off their trail.

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Cuban missile crisis -

The American discovery of Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba nearly escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. The Russians claimed that they were only sending defensive weapons to Cuba. But missile sites in the country were later photographed camouflaged, which convinced the Kennedy administration that Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev harbored more sinister intentions.

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The Martians have landed! -

On Sunday, October 30, 1938, an episode of 'The Mercury Theatre on the Air' was performed and broadcast on the radio. The program, directed and narrated by actor Orson Welles, was an adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel 'The War of the Worlds' and was presented as a series of live news bulletins. The increasingly alarming news updates were so realistic that widespread panic ensued, as listeners really believed the Earth was under attack from Martians.

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Titus Oates -

In 1678, Anglican Titus Oates fabricated and pretended to uncover a supposed Catholic conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II. This fueled widespread anti-Catholic sentiment across the land. Charles' successor, King James, had Oates tried, convicted, and jailed for perjury. However, he was eventually pardoned by William III and even ended up receiving a pension.

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The Cottingley fairies -

Two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, managed to fool none other than the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who created the character Sherlock Holmes) when the mischievous pair faked a series of photographs in 1917 purporting to show the girls meeting with mythical fairies at Cottingley, in northern England. In the 1980s, Elsie and Frances admitted that the "fairies" were cardboard cutouts copied from a children’s book.

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Hitler diaries -

The biggest scandal to hit German journalism after 1945 was the 'Hitler Diaries' hoax. On April 25, 1983, Stern magazine made a sensational announcement, claiming one of their reporters had unearthed a series of 60 volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler. Stern and the UK’s Sunday Times halted serialization of the diaries after a sample of the papers proved the diaries were counterfeit. The forger, Konrad Kujau, was jailed, and several newspaper editors lost their jobs.

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Flair for exploitation -

American showman Phineas Taylor Barnum is remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes as much as his flair for exploiting the public's desire to be amazed. During an early spectacle in 1835, he introduced Joice Heth as George Washington's 161-year-old nursemaid: after her death, an autopsy revealed her to be no more than 80 years old. In 1842, he unveiled his first major hoax, a creature with a body of a monkey and the tail of a fish known as the "Feejee" mermaid

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In the frame -

Dutch painter Han van Meegeren is considered to be one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20^th century. Born in 1889, van Meegeren managed to dupe some of the sharpest art critics and expert art historians of the day by forging paintings of some of the world’s most famous artists, including Pieter de Hooch and, notably, Johannes Vermeer.

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Watergate -

US President Richard Nixon said he played no role in the June 1972 Watergate break-in. "I am not a crook," he declared on national television, insisting, "There can be no whitewash at the White House." He resigned from his second term in office on August 9, 1974. 

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Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda -

Adolf Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, launched a nationwide campaign to convince Germans that the Jewish people were the enemy of all classes. It was devastatingly effective. Hitler used terror, coercion, and mass manipulation to ferment anti-Semitism across the country, which eventually became a national policy known as the "final solution."

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The Profumo affair -

In 1963, British Secretary of State for War John Profumo denied having a intimate relationship with would-be model Christine Keeler in what became known as the "Profumo affair."  Keeler was also involved with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché. Profumo later admitted the liaison and resigned from the government and from Parliament.

See also: All the countries invaded by Russia

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