Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion by Telfer, Tori

A thoroughly entertaining and darkly humorous roundup of history's notorious but often forgotten female con artists and their bold, outrageous scams--by the acclaimed author of Lady Killers.From Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey to Frank Abagnale and Charles Ponzi, audacious scams and charismatic scammers continue to intrigue us as a culture. As Tori Telfer reveals in Confident Women, the art of the con has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are some of the best--or worst. In the 1700s in Paris, Jeanne de Saint-R my scammed the royal jewelers out of a necklace made from six hundred and forty-seven diamonds by pretending she was best friends with Queen Marie Antoinette.In the mid-1800s, sisters Kate and Maggie Fox began pretending they could speak to spirits and accidentally started a religious movement that was soon crawling with female con artists. A gal calling herself Loreta Janeta Velasquez claimed to be a soldier and convinced people she worked for the Con