6 Outrageous Cons That Shouldn’t Have Worked (But Did)

“Conmen Set Up An Entire Fake Country And Fooled Thousands”

This is the first I’ve heard of the Dominion of Melchizedek, but I did once have a lunch conversation with a guy who was trying to establish his own country with him as king. He was some kind of phony-baloney claimant to some non-existent European throne, and he reasoned that several (rogue) countries would support his recognition as a nation if he could purchase a remote island, since those countries could use his new nation to launder money and other unsavory activities. To make things even more disagreeable, he was essentially a neo-Nazi.

I somehow ended up at lunch with this dude, one of our company’s outside consultants, and the Libyan ambassador to the U.N. (Libya was one of the countries he was pitching his plot to.) I was traveling with the consultant on another matter, but he asked me if I would like to join him at this lunch. I soon realized I was in way over my head, and I barely made it through the lunch with my mouth shut, since the entire meal seemed to consist of an hour of anti-Semitism. The scariest thing to me was that they all spoke so freely in front of me, since I was a total stranger. Creepy experience.