One of the greatest scams of all time was perpretrated by Gregor MacGregor.

MacGregor was born in Scotland to a well-off family. He served in the British Army, and then signed on with Bolivar's liberation movement. He fought in the Caribbean, and briefly occupied a town in East Florida.

At the end of a decade of adventuring, MacGregor had a reputation but not much money. He returned to London in 1820 and announced he'd been made a chief by the Miskito Indians, who'd granted him 76,000 square miles of land. MacGregor named this make-believe country Poyais and sold land rights to a couple thousand British settlers.

Unbelievably, his scam didn't fall apart until luckless settlers took him at his word and sailed to Honduras in 1822 - to find an abandoned, lawless shore. A storm wrecked one of their ships. The settlers tried to make a go of it, but failed - when they were evacuated in 1823, 180 of the 240 settlers were dead. MacGregor hustled for Paris- some of his victims so suckered they still insisted the colony would have succeeded if MacGregor had gone with them.

In France, MacGregor was put on trial for fraud but was acquited in 1826 - his lawyer was able to pin blame on MacGregor's associates and employees. MacGregor kept up the Poyais scam for another decade, finding fewer and fewer buyers, and in 1839 he moved to Venezuela, gaining citizenship on the strength of his record under Bolivar. He died there in 1845 on a general's pension.

A good account is David Sinclair's "The Land that Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History."