They say the best way to make money from a gold rush isn’t by digging for nuggets but selling pickaxes and shovels. That’s the approach we’ve taken to capitalise on this year’s hottest trend: scamming. We won’t be joining the countless millennial hucksters defrauding the globe, but instead we have launched a bandwagoning enterprise of our own! Introducing the Top Trumps of young charlatans: a must-have trading card game of all your favourite con-artists. Each card has a unique rating based on their ability to bamboozle credulous investors, dodge the authorities and snag a glossy Netflix series!

When she arrived in New York posing as a fashion queen, Anna Delvey told nobody that her family name was actually Sorokin and that her father was a truck driver from a Moscow suburb. She rampaged through Manhattan’s in-crowd, racking up enormous hotel bills, telling her wealthy mates that the cards connected to her Swiss fortune were glitching, and could they pay instead? She was arrested in 2017 for hoodwinking banks and hotels out of $275,000, though the real sum is likely much higher. After a stint in prison, she spent six weeks as a free woman before being arrested again for overstaying her visa. Sorokin awaits deportation. After her arrest, she told an interviewer: “I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.”

 Manipulating her best friend to pay $62,000 on a blowout stay in La Mamounia, a five-star hotel in Marrakesh that provides guests with their own butler., 

Elizabeth Holmes arrives at her landmark trial last year — sans trademark black poloneck


The world’s youngest self-made female billionaire ran a company that claimed to have invented a pin prick blood test that would have been revolutionary had it been real. As we now know, the technology was bogus, meaning Holmes’s $9 billion creation was a fraud. At Theranos, Holmes created a bizarre cult of personality in which dissent was punishable by lawsuit and private investigator monstering. She spoke at a deeper pitch, never blinked in TV interviews and always wore the black turtleneck of her idol, Steve Jobs. Found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors, Holmes will be sentenced in September and could face 20 years in prison.

 Hoaxing Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch and a battalion of the sharpest minds in American politics, 

He’s been called “the most hated man in America” after price-gouging a drug used to treat AIDS, but that’s not what sent Shkreli to prison. It was lying to hedge fund investors that gave him a seven-year sentence. Before becoming inmate #87850-053 and fined $8 million, Shkreli was something of an internet troll, revelling in his “pharma bro” nickname and asking his followers to get a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair so he could clone her. Even though he is incarcerated, he still pops up online now and again to post on his blog and update his followers on Reddit. He’s set for release this summer.

 Buying a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album for $1.5m as a prank. He admitted last year: “I’m not even a Wu-Tang fan!”, 

The Tinder Swindler began life as Shimon Hayut in a modest suburb of Tel Aviv. He has assumed a number of identities since, most notoriously Simon Leviev, the fictional son of diamond tycoon Lev Leviev, and defrauded an estimated $10 million from victims across Europe in a Ponzi scheme. He maintained a dizzying lifestyle of whisking lonely women away on luxury holidays via private jet, maintaining a relationship with them mostly over the phone, then demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars by claiming business rivals were trying to kill him. He spent his ill-gotten gains on giant champagne bottles and naff designer clothes.

 Charging £759 per video on Cameo, where he now has a profile, Powers: Texting, Weaknesses: Recidivism, 

One of the original millennial scams, Fyre Fest was going to the greatest party the world had ever seen, Woodstock in the Caribbean. It went Biblically wrong. McFarland charged guests up to $100,000 per ticket and promised eco-friendly geodesic domes but made them stay in disaster-zone tents without running water. The celebrity chefs never turned up, so guests were served the saddest cheese sandwiches that not even a labrador would touch. McFarland has been sued eight times and is now serving a six-year prison sentence.

 Enlisting Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin and Emily Ratajkowski to pretend they would be attending Fyre Fest, 

Whenever there’s royal family news, TV shows need a talking head they can put on camera who can nominally assume the role of “expert”. The greatest grifter to ever take advantage of this was undoubtedly an Italian-American man named Tommy Muscatello Junior from upstate New York. He did the rounds of international news programmes under the incredibly obvious pseudonym of Thomas J Mace-Archer-Mills Esq, wearing a 

cap. Amazingly, none of the producers who put him on air noticed that his accent was about as British as Bud Light.

 Providing live commentary of Harry and Meghan’s wedding for a French news channel, 

An Australian influencer who told her followers she cured her cancer with clean living, Gibson was in fact a vision of perfect physical health. Flogging her miracle story on Instagram and in print, she lived large with a giant house, luxury cars and designer clothes. She was busted, and now claims to have been “adopted” by the Ethiopian community of Melbourne, which denies this.

 Claiming to survive brain, blood, spleen, uterine, liver and kidney cancer, a stroke, and multiple heart surgeries., 

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