In 1821, Gregor McGregor, a 19th-century Scot soldier and adventurer, pulled off possibly the most audacious fraud in history when he made up a fictional country and then made a fortune selling bonds on its behalf. McGregor deceived the public, banks, investors, and the governments of France and Venezuela. While not as famous today as Ponzi, Madoff, or Bankman Fried, it's possibly fair to describe him as the greatest con man the world has ever seen. McGregor's bond market frauds raised 1.3 million pounds, which is equivalent to around $5 billion in today's money, which is a lot less than Madoff's scheme, but Madoff's investors got most of their money back, and Madoff ended up in jail. Gregor McGregor, on the other hand, got off scot-free. McGregor's scheme didn't involve convincing the world that he was a great investor; he was far more ambitious than that. He invented an entire country larger than Wales that was rich in natural resources but in need of

development. He persuaded people to not only invest their savings in the bonds of a non-existent government, but also to immigrate to his fictional country. Born on Christmas Eve 1786, Gregor McGregor was the son of an East India Company sea captain. He joined the British army at the age of 16, the youngest age possible when his family paid for a commission as an officer. Before the Crimean War, British military ranks were mostly bought and sold, rather than being earned, conveniently avoiding the need to wait for promotion based on merit or seniority. A year later, Gregor married the daughter of an admiral, receiving a significant dowry which allowed him to buy the rank of Captain for about £900. Around this time, he is said to have developed an obsession with uniforms, rank insignia, and medals, an obsession which would stick with him for life. Gregor is described as being an unremarkable soldier, and he resigned in 1810 after an argument with one of his superiors. He had been part of the 57th

regiment who about a year after he resigned earned the nickname the die hards for their bravery during the Peninsular War. Now never would to worry much about the details. McGregor made much of the regiment's fighting reputation leaving out the fact that it had been earned after he had left. When he returned to Edinburgh, he took on the title of Colonel and wore the badge of a Portuguese nightly order. No one loved military insignia more than Gregor McGregor. The Scots didn't care much for his stories, and so he moved to London introducing himself as Sir Gregor McGregor Bard for falsely claiming to be a knight, to be the chieftain of the McGregor Clan, and a baronet and a colonel. He did this without even buying one of those Scottish lordship title packs like so many YouTubers did a bit over a year ago. As of today, that's right, I'm officially a lord. McGregor's Tall Tales seem to have worked a bit better.

in London. According to his biographer, he was soon the toast of the town. Unfortunately for him, the Venezuelan revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda was in London at the same time and was drawing even more attention than McGregor, which gave him the idea that adventures in the New World might boost his status. At the time, the Spanish were occupied fighting Napoleon, and this distraction allowed Spanish colonies in Latin America to rise up against Spanish rule. McGregor's wife died around this time, bringing an end to his main source of income. So, he sold the small Scottish estate that he had inherited from his father and sailed for Venezuela seeking adventure and wealth. He landed in Caracas to find that an earthquake had recently leveled the city, and the revolutionaries were starting to get quite desperate. McGregor read the room quite well when he met the Revolutionary leadership and dropped his claims of nobility, which might not have gone down too well with them. His false credentials and his tales of having led the 57 die-hards impressed the Revolutionary leadership enough that he

was made a colonel and put in charge of a Cavalry company. In 1812, he married a wealthy Venezuelan woman, Josepha Antonia Andrea Asraa e Laa McGregor, a name that would never fit on a modern driving license. She also happened to be a cousin of Simon Bolivar. As the revolution began running out of steam, McGregor fled to Curau, later joined by Simon Bolivar, who now that General Miranda was imprisoned in Spain, was the new leader of the Venezuelan Independence Movement. McGregor fought along with Bolivar for Venezuelan Independence, and his biographer says that he demonstrated genuine military skill at this time. Bolivar even wrote him a letter which read, The Retreat which you had the honor to conduct is, in my opinion, superior to the conquest of an Empire. In 1817, in a toned-down version of the frauds that would soon follow, McGregor traveled to the United States to raise money and volunteers to invade Florida, which was at the time a Spanish colony. He sold $160,000 worth of script to investors.

promising either land in Florida, or their money back with interest. This is equivalent to around $4 million in today's money, and none of those investors ever saw their money again. Learning a little every day is one of the most important things that you could do, both for personal and professional growth. Today's sponsor, brilliant.org, helps you build real knowledge in minutes a day with fun lessons you can do whenever you have time. Brilliant is the opposite of mindless scrolling. It's a learning platform designed to be uniquely effective, as each lesson involves hands-on problem-solving that lets you play around with concepts so that you learn by doing rather than by memorization. Brilliant recently launched a bunch of new content in data analysis using real-world data. You can learn how to parse and visualize massive data sets to make them easier to interpret, which will help you to make better informed decisions. Brilliance problem-solving approach to learning not only helps you build real knowledge on specific topics but also helps you to become a better

thinker. The content on Brilliant is all crafted by an award-winning team of teachers, researchers, and professionals from MIT, Caltech, Duke, Microsoft, Google, and more. I'm told that it's six times more effective learning with an interactive app than just watching a lecture. With Brilliant, you learn by trying things out for yourself, which is what makes learning with Brilliant so powerful. To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/Patrick or click on the link in the description. You'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Having raised money and volunteers in the United States, McGregor sailed from Charleston, South Carolina, in a ship with 80 men to capture Amelia Island, a small island off the coast of Florida that's 13 miles by 4 miles. With the words I shall sleep either in Hell or Amelia tonight, the Spanish Commander guarding the island overestimated the size of McGregor's force and immediately surrendered. McGregor named the island the Republic of the Floridas, of which he was, of course, the leader. He designed

a flag, a Green Cross on a white background, and set about taxing the locals. His troops were unhappy as he wasn't paying them, so he quickly designed and printed his own currency, Amelia dollars, which didn't make them a whole lot happier. When he saw that the Spanish forces were building up on the mainland opposite Amelia Island, he turned over command to one of his troops, a former US congressman, and fled to the Bahamas where he had medals made up commemorating his victory. McGregor claimed that he had achieved a great victory in taking Amelia Island and that he then sold it to a Frenchman who went on to lose it to the Spanish. He can't be blamed for that, right? The story repeated itself over the next few years; in total, he captured three towns that were later more or less abandoned to the Spanish. Large sums of money were either embezzled or lost in these adventures, and of course titles were made up and medals were awarded. Unfortunately, by the end of 1819, McGregor's luck was starting

to run out at this point. McGregor was wanted in Jamaica for piracy, and Simone Bolivar, who was now the president of Colombia, having heard the stories of McGregor's awful behavior, ordered his death by hanging if he ever set foot on the South American mainland again. Michael Rafter, the brother of Colonel William Rafter, who had been left behind to be killed by the Spanish Army in one of these campaigns, published a book in London that year entitled Memoirs of Gregor McGregor, describing the terrible behavior and the lies that had been told. The book concluded that any person could be induced again to join him in his desperate projects would be to conceive a degree of madness and folly of which human nature, however fallen, is incapable. It turned out that human nature was more capable of folly than Rafter estimated. Gregor McGregor was only getting going. He disappeared for about 6 months in late 1819, resurfacing at the court of King George Frederick Augustus, the Mosquito King. McGregor was now ready to

kick off the most brazen confidence scheme in history by inventing an entire country with documentation to prove its existence. He would convince people to invest and to even move to the country he had invented. The Mosquito Kingdom, overseen by King George Frederick Augustus, was a British protectorate that straddled the border between modern-day Nicaragua and Honduras. The British authorities had been crowning the most powerful chieftains in the regions as kings since the 17th century. These kings had no real power, but the facade allowed the British to obstruct Spanish claims in the region with the argument that these were sovereign territories under British protection. The Mosquito King granted Gregor McGregor a 12,500 square mile plot of mostly useless land along the Mosquito Coast in exchange for rum and jewelry, the currency of the day. McGregor named this plot of land Poyais and returned to London a year later, calling himself the Kazik of Poyais. A Kazik, he explained, was the equivalent of a prince. He claimed to

have been given this title by the mosquito King. Now look, I might be mispronouncing Kazik, and I might be mispronouncing Po, too, but these are words made up by a man who mostly spoke Scottish Gaelic in his youth, so odds are that he mispronounced them too. I was wondering if you could teach me some local phrases. Well, it's very hard to bring me mind. This is the thing. It's only his eyes going Happ, his eyes H, you understand. McGregor claimed to be visiting London as a guest of King George IV, having arrived to attend the coronation as a representative of the nation of Poer. He explained that he was also there to seek investment and immigrants for the new country. This story would not have sounded as crazy in 1820 as it does today, as at the time, given the turmoil in Latin America where governments were rising and falling all the time and borders were constantly shifting. The idea that a decorated General like McGregor might be leading a small Latin

American state was not entirely implausible. Financial markets in the early 1820s made the atmosphere ripe for a con man like McGregor too. Napoleon had been defeated a few years earlier, and the British economy was now booming, driven on by manufacturing. Inflation was low, and wages were rising. Interest rates drifted down, and the most popular British Government Bond, the consul, yielded as low as 3%. British investors were seeking more exciting investment opportunities with higher expected returns. They bought the bonds of Russia, Prussia, and Denmark, which were riskier but yielded 5%. They looked to invest in mining companies too, which offered massive potential returns. Shares in the Anglo-American Mining Company rose more than 300% in a single month. At the end of 1824, the collapse of the Spanish Empire meant that there was now a new list of countries to invest in, and London was in the middle of its first Emerging Market boom. Bonds issued by the new governments of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala yielded twice the interest rate of the

British conman David Sinclair, in his book The Land That Never Was, shows how he convinced the public to invest in his bonds and even sell their homes and convert their savings into poor dollars to move to his made-up country. McGregor conducted interviews in the National newspapers and supported his claims with a 355-page book supposedly written by Dr. Thomas Strangeways, but which was actually written by McGregor himself. The book promised friendly natives, a mild climate, and fertile soil. Po's forests were said to be filled with valuable timber. The book was filled with believable information as huge sections of it had been copied from other books that had been written about neighboring regions. It was filled with descriptions of the wildlife, the capital city of St. Joseph, which was entirely made up. St. Joseph was supposed to be a town of 20,000 people with palaces, banks, cathedrals, opera houses, theaters, and more. The book described how the country was so rich in gold that the rivers and streams contained huge nuggets and that you could reach down

and grab fistfuls of pure gold from the riverbeds. The book was not the only printed material. There were pamphlets, land certificates, documents describing the parliamentary system, a fictional Constitution, even trading and commerce laws. McGregor, being a lifelong lover of Insignia, had illustrations of the poer code of arms, drawings of the uniforms worn by the different ranks of the army, and he explained in detail the system of nobility and honors. It would have been extremely expensive to print all of these books and certificates at the time, and people were taken in by it. Po Asian land certificates were sold at a price roughly equivalent to a working man's daily wage. In 1820, there was enough demand that McGregor eventually almost doubled the price without diminishing sales. In October 1822, McGregor offered A2 200,000 poer Bond yielding 6%, a similar rate to that paid by other Latin American countries. This was equivalent to raising around $300 million in today's money. Unlike the other Latin American countries that were issuing bonds, poer had had no record of

collecting taxes, but McGregor argued that PO was so abundant in natural resources that export tax revenue would easily cover the interest payments on the debt. Investors went with it, and the bond was successfully floated, funding secured. While McGregor targeted Londoners for his capital, he targeted his fellow Scots as settlers, and this is where the story takes a rather dark turn. This wasn't just the Fire Festival. As tempting as it may be to view Gregor McGregor as a bit of a rascal who took money from foolish investors who should have known better, we have to remember that he shipped hundreds of his fellow Scots to attractive land in South America incapable of supporting such a settlement. The majority of these people died. In the 1820s, immigration to America, which had slowed due to the war, had started to gain momentum once more. McGregor's pitch found a natural audience in a public excited about the idea of a fresh start abroad. McGregor just needed to persuade potential immigrants that PO, a brand new country, had more to offer them than America did.

McGregor preyed on the Scots who were envious of England because Scotland, unlike England, had no foreign colonies. He rounded up people in Glasgow and Edinburgh with the promise of this new Scottish territory. Settlers were told that while anyone could invest, the people of Scotland had been specifically selected for their skills and bravery to colonize PA, writing a national wrong. Hundreds of people lined up to board immigrant ships in September and October of 1822. Two ships set out, shipping people to their debts on the other side of the world. Passengers enthusiastically exchanged their British pounds for McGregor's made-up currency before boarding the ships. The ships made it safely across the ocean in a two-month journey, but the immigrants were shocked to find nothing there when they arrived. There was no port, no city, and no gold-laden streams. The local tribes, while friendly enough, were not particularly helpful. At first, the settlers thought that a mistake had been made and that they had been dropped off in the wrong place. A search party was sent out by the leader of the expedition.

to find the city of St. Joseph, the settlers decided to stay where they had landed while the mistake was clarified. They didn't have much of a choice at this point as their tickets had been one way and the ships had already left. They had tools, medicine, and a year's basic provisions, so they should hopefully be okay. There were tensions between the settlers; the officer class initially refused to help set up camp. Hunting and fishing trips were unsuccessful, and the settlers began to go hungry. When the rainy season set in, disease began to spread. One settler attempted to escape in an improvised canoe and drowned; another shot himself in May. A ship transporting the chief magistrate of Biz to visit the mosquito King landed near the settlement. The magistrate was horrified by what he saw and informed the settlers that the whole story was a lie. There was no country, no city, no kazik, and that they would all die if they didn't leave with him for Belize. While the settlers were deciding what to do, the mosquito King arrived and told the settlers that he

was revoking McGregor's land grant. That he had never given McGregor any princely title, nor had he given him the right to sell land or raise loans against it. The settlers were told that they were on the king's land illegally and would have to go unless they pledged allegiance to him. The government of Bise sent three ships in total to rescue the settlers who all left except for about 40 people who were too sick to make the journey. Malaria, yellow fever, and malnutrition killed two-thirds of the settlers, including many that made it to Belize. 180 settlers in total died. Word of the disaster reached London and the British Navy was able to dispatch ships to intercept and turn back the five additional boats that were already on route. Things were not working out for McGregor's bond investors. Even before news of his lives got back to London, worries had started to emerge over the legitimacy of debt raised for the new Latin American governments, many of which were not officially recognized by Britain. A panic in Colombian bonds quickly spread to Peruvian debt and on

to add to these difficulties, the French announced plans to depose the Spanish government, and the expectation that Spain would default on its debt caused further contagion in the bond markets. Latin American bonds fell sharply, with the price of Po bonds down by 16% before news of Lies even reached London. Once news of the fraud reached London, the bond prices collapsed entirely. McGregor, who was at this point still busy recruiting settlers and raising money, realized that it might be time to skip town. He announced that he was making a trip to Italy for the health of his wife, but instead secretly traveled to Paris. Much to McGregor's surprise, instead of blaming him, the surviving settlers blamed Hector Hall, an ex-British army officer who had been made the commander of the first immigration party, who the other settlers decided had conned McGregor. McGregor couldn't believe his luck and joined in with this story, additionally accusing wealthy people from B of sabotaging the settlement to prevent competition from Po. McGregor sued a number of newspapers.

accusing them of knowingly printing lies about him. Surprisingly enough, W settled in Paris. McGregor simply set about repeating the same old trick of trying to raise capital and recruit settlers. Once again, he was successful with his pitch, persuading 60 people to immigrate. This time around, though, the French authorities became suspicious when French settlers began applying for passports to travel to a country that no one could prove existed. This triggered an investigation, and McGregor was arrested and imprisoned in France. McGregor demanded that he be released immediately as the kazek of a Sovereign Nation. He claimed to have diplomatic immunity. This didn't work, and he ended up standing trial in France along with three of his associates. A fourth associate had fled to the Netherlands with all of the paperwork which was needed as evidence. McGregor and his associates accused the man who had escaped with the evidence of defrauding them and everyone else. McGregor wrote up a complicated backstory exonerating himself. The French Court, unable to prove anything without the missing evidence, went on to acquit McGregor and not just

that but the judges praised McGregor for aiding in the investigation. McGregor returned to London a free man and once again attempted to take loans in the name of poer. Amusingly, this time around, he was less successful as other conmen, having worked out the scheme, were also issuing poer bonds and offering better interest rates than McGregor. In 1826, he attempted to float £800,000 worth of poer bonds, but by now his reputation was irreparably damaged and the taste for Latin American investments had faded. The bond flopped. McGregor returned to Edinburgh at this point for a few years. In 1838, after his wife had died, he sold up and set sail for Venezuela once more. At the age of 52, he had one last con to pull. Simone Bolivar, who had threatened to have him hanged if he ever set foot in Latin America again, was now dead. McGregor managed to talk his way back into his old position as a high-ranking army officer in Venezuela. His bad reputation from 20 years earlier had

mostly been forgotten, and he was able to pass himself off as a war hero. He was given a comfortable Army pension along with back pay. Both the Venezuelan president and defense minister vouched for him, having both been around when he had fought for the country's Liberation 20 years ago. McGregor lived out the rest of his life as a celebrated war hero on a general's pension in Venezuela until his death in 1845 at the age of 58. He was given a full military funeral with a procession through the city attended by the president and was buried in Caracus Cathedral. The area that McGregor called poer remains undeveloped to this day. In his book The Land That Never Was (I'll link to it in the video description), David Sinclair argues that much like Charles Ponzi 100 years later, McGregor possibly actually believed in what he was doing, which often seems to be the case with conman. A puzzling and disturbing part of this story is that McGregor was responsible for hundreds of settler debts, which were entirely

unnecessary if all he was after was money. McGregor had already sold land rights and floated his bonds long before the settlers boarded ships. There was no need to transport them to the jungles of South America to die. Sinclair argues in his book that McGregor appeared to believe that one of his ancestors had been involved in the Darien scheme, an unsuccessful attempt by the kingdom of Scotland to establish a colony in the Darien gap on the isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s, and he was possibly convinced that the Scots should try again in Central America. He was possibly so deluded that he believed that it was his birthright to eventually lead a South American colony. McGregor, it would appear, was a narcissist as many conmen are. He awarded himself many titles, medals, pins, and stripes. He created flags, heraldry, and complex honor systems both in Amelia Island and for power, giving titles to the most senior settlers and of course keeping the grandest titles for himself. Thomas planned, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University, argues that fraudsters

frequently construct rationalizations in their heads that allow them to mercilessly carry out their scams, even when it comes at the great personal expense of their victims. He says that they simply see people as objects to use for personal gain and have no remorse. They can easily justify their behaviors using various kinds of psychological gymnastics. McGregor appears to have shown no concern for the people he harmed; they were just a source of funds and a way of demonstrating to investors that things were taking shape in power. Now, what about the victims? Why did they fall for it, in particular the ones who risk their lives to relocate to another part of the world? Tamar Frankl of Boston University, who studied hundreds of victims of financial cons, pointed out in an economist article that McGregor specifically targeted those with a natural tendency to trust him. He looked for settlers in Scotland, telling them that hardy and adventurous Highlanders had the skills and character to develop the new land. He played on the trust that people grant those from their

own religious or ethnic group. Bernie maof did the same thing targeting members of the Jewish community in his Ponzi scheme. Amusingly, McGregor's Bond banknotes and land rights do still turn up at auction from time to time, and they're bought by collectors. While you can buy one, you can also just print one off from the internet. It is, after all, a fake bond from a fake country. Do you really need a genuine version? If you enjoyed today's video, you should watch my video on Charles Ponzi, the man who gave his name to the infamous Ponzi scheme. Next, don't forget to check out our sponsor brilliant.org using the link in the video description. Have a great day and see you in the next video. Bye. [Music]

History's Greatest Conman!

Patrick Boyle is a hedge fund manager, a university professor and a former investment banker. 

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