There are all sorts of fakers and cheats; many win and get away with it, many others get caught and shunned for their actions. Some are even found out, but walk away as though nothing happened, because the public simply doesn’t care. These are the 15 biggest cheats, fakers and frauds who won. Some kept their winnings, and some are hated and reviled to this day.
Milli Vanilli
In 1989 at a live performance put on by MTV, Rob and Fab of Milli Vanilli experienced the worst possible lip-sync disaster imaginable. In the middle of their song “Girl You Know it’s True,” the recording began to skip on the main lyrics — over and over again. Rob and Fab tried to roll with it for as long as they could, but wound up running off the stage. The audience wasn’t immediately sure of what had actually happened, critics took to analyzing and it wasn’t long before the duo was found out for a fraud. They were outed as two hapless male models and stripped of their fame overnight.
James Frey
Once backed by Oprah herself, James Frey made it big with his supposed memoir, A Million Little Pieces, only to be outed as a fraud for making up large chunks of the story he claimed was autobiographical. He pissed off so many people that Oprah herself confronted him live on TV, and even South Park devoted an episode to immortalizing the scandal with the story of Towelie and his book, A Million Little Fibers.
Priscilla Ceballos
In a half-assed attempt to get her six year-old daughter tickets to see Hannah Montana, Priscilla Ceballos — and her nonexistent eyebrows — fabricated a story to win a contest put on by Disney. The contest goal was for the little girls themselves to write a heart warming story that would win over the contest judges. Priscilla sent in a story that she claimed her daughter wrote, that began with ”My daddy died this year in Iraq.” The story went on in similar tear-jerking fashion, but was completely fabricated. She was found out and put on national TV to apologize for it.
Laura Albert
Publishing under a pseudonym ”J.T. Leroy,” Laura Albert wrote several fictional books that were supposedly semi-autobiographical memoirs of a twenty-something male prostitute who was homeless and addicted to drugs. Aside from her being a woman, she couldn’t be further from the persona she had concocted as the author. By the time she was found out, she had already gotten as far as a movie-deal, and the company financing the operation filed suit against her for fraud.
The Tunisian 12-Baby Faker
Last year, the world just would not shut up about Nadya Octomom Suleman, but at the height of her popularity, a challenger arose. Across the world, in Tunisia of all places, a woman who never gave a real name for herself claimed to be pregnant with 12 babies — six boys and six girls — and quickly gobbled up every media headline previously slated for Octomom. After every media outlet had reported on her story twice over, she was found out to be a mentally-unstable fraud who had gone into hiding before anyone had a chance to confirm her identity.
The Onion (Actually Winning a Peabody)
We’re not about to say a bad word about The Onion for this; it’s just plain funny. The much-loved publication was summoned to Athens, Georgia last year to accept their brand new Peabody Award — an award generally given to journalists who have shown exemplary merit. The folks at The Onion never applied for the award or sent any submission materials, and were as surprised as anyone that they were nominated at all. When accepting the award, their executive producer thanked his “fellow journalists” for the honor.
The Fake Nurse: Betty A. Lichtenstein
Betty A. Lichtenstein, was arrested last year for pretending to be a registered nurse in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was so good at faking it, apparently, that she was awarded Nurse of the Year by the Connecticut Nursing Association in 2008 — an association that doesn’t even exist. She even staged the banquet where she received the “honor.”
Robin Goldstein & Osteria L’Intrepido
Robin Goldstein is a clever fellow, and decided he was as fed up with the pretentious snobbery of wine magazines as the rest of us lowly plebes. He made up a fake restaurant, built a crappy fake website for the place, grabbed a telephone and fax number based in Milan, Italy, and went to work putting together the most pretentious menu he could come up with. For the “reserves” part of the wine list, he used the worst-rated wines in the last decade’s worth of Wine Spectator issues — the magazine he had targeted in an attempt to win their “Award of Excellence.” He paid the $250 fee and entered his restaurant for the magazine to rate, and got the award. He then blogged about the experience and told the magazine, who swear they don’t go around giving these awards away for nothing.
Ernie Bewick
Ernie Bewick is your traditional Guy Ritchie style english thug with a “protection” business. He ran a security gig in Sunderland, England, where he was a “feared security boss” for nightclubs, pubs, restaurants and hotels in the area. Basically he was such a hardass that the local punks were too afraid of him to mess with whatever establishments said he was their guy. The catch is, old Ernie wasn’t even there, as he was serving two years of a six-year sentence for beating a man to death in a street fight the other guy started. Ernie’s security business literally banking on his name alone, and he was raking in the dough — equal to about $600,000 worth. The government found out about his unstated income in 2004 and he’s been fighting ever since to keep the money.
Tommy Glenn Carmichael
Tulsa, Oklahoma-based grifter, cheat, shark and gambler Tommy Glenn Carmichael was busted back in the 80’s for scamming slot machines with a handheld device of his own design. After spending some time in prison, and thinking long and hard, he devised new inventions that he later put to use to cheat newer slot machines, constantly upgrading his equipment as time wore on. For years, he played a game of cat and mouse with the country’s leading casino empires, until he was busted again in the late 90’s using what he called a “light wand,” and finally had to switch sides to stay out of prison. Today he makes anti-cheat devices for slot machines, but he’s still banned from casinos for life.
Florida State University
Florida State got it’s proverbial wrists slapped pretty hard by the NCAA recently for a cheating scandal involving 61 students, who played in 10 different sports for the school. The cheating took place in an online Music Appreciation class — the kind that people take for free credits because they’re so easy. The athletes were apparently so mind-numbingly dense that they couldn’t even pass a class designed to be passed by people who are mind-numbingly dense, and resorted to cheating en masse via use of a “tutor,” who simply gave them the answers to the tests.
José Luis Rodriguez
We really shouldn’t be too terribly hard on Mr. Rodriguez for his photograph. It’s an amazing shot, truly, and he did title the piece appropriately: Storybook Wolf. His problem is that the contest was for National History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and the wolf he used for the shot is very likely to be a tamed animal. Fact is, wolves don’t like to jump, period, and a real one would have preferred to stuff itself through the gate a thousand times before it would consider leaping over it. On top of that, just what are the odds of happening across a wild wolf hopping over a fence in the middle of the night? Rodriguez was awarded the prize for this photo, only to have it revoked by the judges after calls of cheating were heard.
Guillaume Chauvin & Remi Huberr
Guillaume Chauvin & Remi Huberr were two French art students attending Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, France. They entered the Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant, a contest for pictures that best exemplify the art and profession of photojournalism, with a collection of gritty shots showcasing the hardships of modern students. The collection won, and when Gullaume and Remi took the stage, they outed themselves to the judges and audience instead of accepting their award. They said that they never expected to win, and that they had entered the contest in mild protest, as a statement about photojournalism being more staged and artsy today than the real stuff of the past. They only got more recognition after that.
Bill Gates
1980 was a long, long time ago, and memories aren’t what they used to be. Especially not for IBM, Bill Gates, and anybody who was around back then when DOS first made waves in the tech world. Today, the general public goes on thinking that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world because he invented DOS and Windows and all the other goodies that Microsoft has been peddling since the early days of the PC. The problem is, Bill Gates was never successful in his attempt to build an operating system back in 1980. He paid a man named Tim Paterson $50,000 for his shaky but working operating system, QDOS, which was a rough clone of an already established OS called CP/M, written by Gary Kildall. Gates polished QDOS into a finished product, renamed it DOS, slapped Microsoft on the disk labels and licensed it to IBM in what would become the start of a very lucrative career for an individual of very mediocre technical talent. The rest is blue-screened history.
Thomas Edison
Edison was a prolific inventor and business man, to be sure, but he was also something of a thieving bastard. At least, that’s what many of his contemporaries called him. Edison ran around gobbling up patents at an inhuman pace, either buying them out or paying off inventors before they filed, so that he could file them instead. His greatest claim to fame, the light bulb, was already installed in street lamps and business signs in England by a man named Joseph Swan, who actually did invent them. In the ensuing legal battle over the US patent for them, he had to agree to take on Swan as a partner for his business dealings in England. Nikola Tesla, inventor of AC power and fluorescent light bulbs, among many other things, died an angry, lonely, bitter man in a New York apartment — cursing Edison because he had stolen several of his inventions and called them his own. Tesla wasn’t the friendliest of guys back in his day, either, but he’d probably be pretty happy knowing that today, he is the one held in high regard, while Edison is widely known for the man he really was.
Comments
Joe Hall
January 28th, 2010 - 3:08:22 AM
While I somewhat agree with you regarding Bill Gates, I must bring up the fact that he isn't a "man of mediocre technical talent". Bill Gates is a VERY talented software engineer, please research this area and correct the article
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Markus Diersbock
January 28th, 2010 - 3:55:27 AM
Bill Gates was "man of mediocre technical talent"? Very wrong, actually. It is very well known, Gates would take other MS engineers' code and tighten it up for memory efficiency, in all-night coding sessions. He also wrote compilers for various languages.
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Stijn
January 28th, 2010 - 4:16:22 AM
Where in the world is Bernard "Bernie" Madoff, the biggest fraud of them all?
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Colin
January 28th, 2010 - 4:39:21 AM
Bill Gates was a bit more than mediocre, he doesn't deserve the title as a technical genius. But..... he does deserve the title of genius as a business man and a talent for innovation. Just because the guy didn't write it himself from scratch shouldn't stop this from being his idea. He just hired help to pull them off. It happens everyday in business. Apple have probably bought out lots of companies that had good products.
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DAvid
January 28th, 2010 - 5:16:05 AM
Bill Gates deserves every syllable of negative praise available to him. The guy and M$ is a notorious storied thief. DOS isn't the only tech M$ stole and probably won't be the last.
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Jason Bentley
January 28th, 2010 - 5:20:43 AM
Anyone that would categorize Bill Gates as 'individual of very mediocre technical talent' deserves to have his credibility challenged. What multi-national, multi-billion dollar company did you found and run? Oh, and it had to change the world the way Microsoft did and employ thousands and thousands of employees and have many happy shareholders. I thought not. If you actually studied your sources before publishing this scam of an article, you would have known that Bill Gates is anything but a fraud.
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Anonymouse
January 28th, 2010 - 6:04:54 AM
did you "found"?
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Mikey
January 28th, 2010 - 6:14:04 AM
Bill Gates did not steal anything, he paid for the system, and the guy that designed it knew exactly what he was going to do with it. I don't know enough to comment on Bills technical prowess, but I can say for certain that he is a fantastic marketer.
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tester
January 28th, 2010 - 6:16:19 AM
wow - all cred lost on the gates comment - he and paul allen only wrote the first BASIC for the first PC (Altair) - the QDOS issue was simply a great business decision. Things were happening so fast and furious at that time and IBM was ready to roll in the hay of the PC industry. Like Apple did anything original with the Mac?
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Advocate
January 28th, 2010 - 6:29:21 AM
What about Rosie Ruiz, who cheated and ACCIDENTALLY won the 1980 Boston marathon... i can't believe that didn't make the list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_Ruiz
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david
January 28th, 2010 - 6:31:42 AM
My favorite of the bunch? James Frey. After all the hype on Oprah I bought his book and stopped reading it mid-way as fraudulent. I gave it to our local library and they sold it for 25 cents.
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Jess woods
January 28th, 2010 - 6:32:28 AM
LOL, seems like the 80s were just yesterday! Jess www.online-privacy.int.tc
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david wayne osedach
January 28th, 2010 - 6:33:59 AM
I still can't believe how Octo-mom pulled it off. From phony plastic surgery to over-insemination she knew exactly what she wanted. And went for it!
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Anonymous
January 28th, 2010 - 6:39:57 AM
This article was mildly interesting until you got to Bill Gates and then it just turned to complete garbage. Really, you have no business writing if you cant go to Google or Wikipedia and look up your topics. Others have lambasted you for Bill Gates so I'll skip that but what really ticks me off is your idiot crap about Thomas Edison. No he didn't invent the incandescent filament, Davy Humphry did that 70 years previous. What Edison did was invent the *system* of electric lighting that was required to actually delivery a marketable product to peoples homes. Part of that was perfecting the filament and bulb itself that had frustrated so many others up to that point. The most important part however is the generator and distribution components. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb Try using Google and Wikipedia sometime; it's easy and fun! And it will keep you from looking completely retarded.
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ninjitsioux
January 28th, 2010 - 6:43:23 AM
Bernard "Bernie" Madoff with your money thats where he's at
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Mikey
January 28th, 2010 - 7:09:34 AM
I'm sorry, but the AC generator and distribution systems were not Edison's idea, or his design, but Nikola Tesla's. Edison's own idea was DC power, which is more dangerous than AC at the same power levels, and also dismally inefficient to distribute as it looses far more energy when transmitted through power lines.
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rebeliousTexan
January 28th, 2010 - 7:42:22 AM
Where is George W. Bush and The Republican Party in this list? They helped him cheat his way into the Presidency and surely deserve a nomination. From the wide spread voter repression in mostly poor and black areas of Florida (i.e. Democrats) in the '00 election to the confirmed election machine rigging and anomalous results in Ohio in the '04 election, they have perpetrated the greatest cheat of all on the American public for 8 years.
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Brent
January 28th, 2010 - 8:06:12 AM
Where are the New England Patriots?
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Brody
January 28th, 2010 - 8:30:51 AM
Bill Gates stole BASIC (built and unlicensed copy of Dartmouth's invention. Dartmouth didn't sue because they wanted to continue the widespread adoption of the language.) He lied and misrepresented what he was going to use QDOS for, and Gary Kildall of Seattle Computer Products eventually won a long, protracted lawsuit against Microsoft regarding the re-licensing of QDOS to IBM. Even though Kildall won, he got peanuts relative to the value of DOS to Microsoft. All you idiot Microsoft fanbois really need to learn a little more about the man you hold in high regard. IMO he is a liar and a thief. Microsoft has continually locked out the competition through evil and illegal acts, and are a convicted monopolist. Go read about Embrace-Extend-Extinguish (invented by IBM, BTW) and you might learn how Microsoft has stayed on top so long. He may have been a good coder once, but ALL his predictions that he bothered to put in a book were wrong.
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Gord
January 28th, 2010 - 9:15:18 AM
Do I dare mention "Lisa" in the same breath with Bill Gates? (Avoids the Apple fans' great and furious anger)
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Bruno Marone
January 28th, 2010 - 9:43:09 AM
You forgot to mention the ancestor of INTERNET....THE TELEPHONE The Telephone was invented by ANTONIO MEUCCI in 1854 and patented in 1971 but he didn´t have the money to renew the patent and it was later assigned in 1876 to GRAHAM BELL
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Jack
January 28th, 2010 - 10:17:50 AM
Hey Brent, throw your mom in there. You a Jets fan? EVERYONE in sports cheats... it happens all the time, as for football, I could care less, don't be a hypocrite. Who the hell cares about a fake picture of a jumping wolf, or a picture of some douche that wrote a fake book and got his balls snipped by Okrah. Bernie Madoff. Plain, simple and whomever wrote this piece of trash of an article should be writing for the NY Post. Utter shite.
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Gene Callahan
January 28th, 2010 - 1:52:18 PM
"Bill Gates stole BASIC (built and unlicensed copy of Dartmouth's invention. Dartmouth didn't sue because they wanted to continue the widespread adoption of the language.)" WTF are you talking about? Why would they need a license to write a BASIC interpreter? People write compilers and interpreters all the time for languages without needing to "license" the language.
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Wonderin'
January 28th, 2010 - 6:54:00 PM
When did Oprah change her last name to "herself"? Man, what a snarky piece of unsupported, undocumented envy and bitterness....
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Luftmensch
January 28th, 2010 - 8:46:52 PM
Try Alexander Graham Bell. Biggest, most successful fraud until recently.
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Scottw232
January 28th, 2010 - 9:59:56 PM
To all the Bill Gates Comments defending him. Yes, Bill Gates did do some pretty amazing things, and it lead to a big break in the tech world, but come on, it wasn't his original idea, he got it from someone else...Paid for or not. It's like turning in a research paper that you paid a geek to write for you, it's still wrong. Enjoy this article for what it is. I thought this was a very interesting article. Good job. And to all the people that don't agree or like it? Why don't you write a better one? Go on... Write a WHOLE article about how GREAT Bill Gates is, I'm sure it will be a literary work of genius.
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Scottw232
January 28th, 2010 - 10:04:23 PM
And to Anonymous, Have you used Google and or Wikipedia for Nikolai Tesla? Do it sometimes. And when you get done with that, try Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt8Y93k0pB0
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jose
January 29th, 2010 - 1:36:07 AM
XEROX - Bill stole everything from the mouse.....
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Fabris
January 29th, 2010 - 2:04:36 AM
What? No Philip Glass?
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Steph
January 29th, 2010 - 7:21:32 AM
Umm. I don't know if you can say Milli Vanilli "won." One of them killed himself later after all the jokes and insults. Not really a win
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JJJ
January 29th, 2010 - 2:13:01 PM
I read the James Frey book before he was outed as a fraud. I thought it was an interesting read, but kept thinking there was something wrong. I've killed my share of brain cells, and the truth is that you just don't remember these events all that vividly as he described (if at all).
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r
January 29th, 2010 - 5:37:48 PM
I used to work w/ Tim Patterson at MS. He was pretty happy about the whole licensing of QDOS and his subsequent deal at MS. I always had the sense that he felt he made much more $ through the MS employment than he would have otherwise...
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Matt
January 30th, 2010 - 10:38:30 AM
Paying someone $50k for an operating system is not "theft" as some of the comments would like to believe. I believe it's called "commerce".
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Whoa
January 30th, 2010 - 6:23:44 PM
Paying someone for a license, modding the software and re-selling it under an new name isn't theft ? What is it, then ?
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Beau
February 1st, 2010 - 2:09:16 PM
Paying someone for QDOS wasn't the cheat. The fact that he sold a licensing agreement to IBM before he purchased the OS is what makes him a cheat. A fantastic one, but a cheat nonetheless.
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