Stupid Cons That Actually Worked For A While

4 A Clinic Sold $14,000 Tubes Of Cream To The Military

Defrauding the healthcare system has long been a tried and true way for morally bankrupt folk to make a quick buck. Ditto bilking the American military by convincing them to do things like buy $10,000 toilet seats. Mash those two golden geese together and you have the recipe for grifting foie gras, at least until someone finds it odd that you're selling tubes of pain relief cream for $14,500 each.

It was essentially a kickback scheme, with the American taxpayer filling the role of the designated sucker. The operation was based in Tennessee, where a clinic exploited a loophole to avoid FDA scrutiny. By falsely calling their "cure all" cream a compound medication (a mixture specifically tailored for one person) they were able to charge absurd prices for their special goo.

Maybe it would have worked if they'd kept things small and got out while they were still ahead. But just like you can't pull a gambling addict from the blackjack table while they're up, the apparently easy money was too hard to ignore. So more people got involved, including marines who were tasked with recruiting other service members to receive phony prescriptions for a cream that did little beyond defraud the public. Meanwhile the ringleaders, in the grand tradition of history's dopiest mobsters, spent their non-laundered lucre on wise and subtle investments like huge estates with monogrammed gates.

According to the former head of military insurance behemoth TriCare, the government was on track to spend two billion on bogus prescriptions... in one year. But the behavior of the perpetrators was so "extraordinarily brazen" that the scheme's unraveling was inevitable. Two doctors and a nurse pled guilty and face lengthy stays in the federal hoosegow, where at least a tube of beating relief cream might trade well for cigarettes.

3 A Man Complaining About Bread Racked Up A Quarter Million Dollars

In 2015, Takashi Ishimoto called a Tokyo grocery store to complain that the bread he purchased was soggy. So far this is just the story of a 53-year-old man getting ready for his retirement hobbies, but the next day he called and pretended to be a bigshot at the store's head office. Furious that word of the store's infamous soggy bread was spreading, employees were ordered to apologise to Ishimoto by delivering him fresh bread... and cold, hard cash.

Ishimoto somehow sounded confident enough to bilk a store for $2,500. Oh, and upon his eventual arrest, he was linked to a series of scams from previous years that used the same tactic to bring in around a quarter million dollars. Such a wacky scheme could have only worked in Japan, because American retailers would have made him wait on hold for five hours, then told him it wasn't their fault he didn't buy the store's $129.99 annual bread insurance.

2 A Terrible Musician With No Fans Conned His Way Into A European Tour

Every teenager dreams of being a rock star, and every tone deaf 29-year-old who can't accept that they're going to be stuck working in an insurance office for the next 35 years will go to desperate lengths to keep the dream alive. So when Jered Eames, aka Threatin, booked a 10-city European tour, it looked like he finally got his big break. Then, at his London show, three people showed up to a venue built for 300. Because that's about how many fans Threatin really has.