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The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower — Twice
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In 1925, a con artist named Victor Lustig read a newspaper article about the Eiffel Tower needing costly repairs, and saw an opportunity most people would never have imagined.
Posing as a government official, he quietly invited a group of scrap metal dealers to a secret meeting, explaining that the tower was to be sold for scrap due to the expense of maintaining it. He collected a “bribe” from the winning bidder to keep the deal quiet — and then vanished before anyone realized there was no real sale.
Confident Enough to Try It Again
The embarrassed victim never went to police, afraid of looking foolish. Lustig, encouraged by his success, returned to Paris months later and attempted to sell the Eiffel Tower a second time to a different buyer.
He was eventually caught for other crimes, including counterfeiting, but the Eiffel Tower scheme remains one of the boldest confidence tricks in recorded history.
What does it take to convince someone they’re buying a national monument?
