Five fraudsters and the prehistory of post-truth
Extracted from "My Mensa Weekly" a weekly online magazine published for the members of Mensa by British Mensa Ltd, Deansgate, 62-70 Tettenhall Road, Wolverhampton, WV1 4TH
Words: Andrew Cattanach
At the tail end of 2025, a photograph doing the rounds on social media brought trains to a halt. The image appeared to show a collapsed railway bridge in Lancaster. Twisted metal, fractured concrete – the kind of scene that demands immediate action. Network Rail stopped services while engineers scrambled to assess the damage. There was just one problem: the bridge had not collapsed. The photograph had never existed outside a generative AI model.
The disruption was brief, but the implications were not. In a media environment where synthetic images travel faster than verification, deception no longer requires elaborate staging or specialist skill. It requires a prompt, a platform and – sometimes – nothing more sinister than carelessness. Add deliberate bad actors to the mix and it can tip from disruption into something uglier.
It’s tempting to treat this as a uniquely digital crisis. But the instinct to manufacture reality long predates the machine. Long before algorithms and AI, people were building alternative realities by hand. Some did so for money, some for prestige, some as satire, and some simply for the thrill of being believed.
Below are five very different fraudsters, each with their own methods and motivations. Taken together, their stories cast a useful light on how we navigate questions of evidence and belief. Especially in this age of synthetic media.
Piltdown Man
In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have unearthed ‘Piltdown Man’ – a set of bone fragments purported to be the fossilised remains of Britain’s earliest human ancestor. For decades, scientists treated these remains as genuine, and the discovery shaped influential models of human evolution. But doubts persisted, and it was only in 1953 that the specimen was definitively exposed as a forgery: a composite of a modern human skull and an orangutan jaw that had been deliberately aged. Dawson’s motive appears to have been personal: seeking professional recognition and prestige within the archaeological community. The hoax endured so long, in part because the forgery confirmed existing expectations about human ancestry, and because many researchers relied on casts rather than examining the original bones closely.
The Cottingley Fairies
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publicly endorsed a set of photographs purporting to show real fairies, the images gained a legitimacy that far outstripped their playful origins. The photographs, produced by two young cousins in Cottingley, Yorkshire, in 1917, depicted delicate winged figures dancing beside the girls in a sunlit garden. Public fascination endured for years, and both believers and sceptics debated the images’ authenticity. Only decades later did James Randi and others conclusively identify photographic evidence of fakery: the fairies had been cut from paper and suspended with threads. Even so, the girls continued to deflect full responsibility for many years, and the photos remain part of the cultural imagination.
The Sokal Affair
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal did something unusual: he wrote and submitted a deliberately nonsensical academic paper to the cultural studies journal Social Text. Titled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, the article married absurd claims with post-modern jargon and was accepted for publication. After it appeared, Sokal revealed the stunt in another magazine, explaining that his goal was to test whether a prestigious humanities journal would publish an article that sounded impressive but was empirically meaningless. The episode sparked an intense debate about scholarly standards, peer review and the relationship between science and the humanities.
Helen Duncan
Scottish medium Helen Duncan built a following in the 1930s and 40s by producing what she claimed was ‘ectoplasm’ during séances – a white substance that appeared to issue from her body. Investigators repeatedly demonstrated that the substance was cheesecloth or muslin, sometimes crudely shaped into spirit forms. Yet exposure did not end her career. In 1944, amid wartime tensions and following a séance in which she claimed a dead sailor had revealed the sinking of HMS Barham, she was arrested and convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 – becoming the last person imprisoned under that law.
Charles Ponzi
Charles Ponzi gave his name to one of the most infamous financial frauds in history. In the early 1920s, Ponzi promised investors extraordinary returns, claiming he could profit from international postal reply coupons – vouchers bought cheaply in one country and redeemed for stamps at a higher value in another. In truth, Ponzi didn’t invest the funds at all; he used the money from new investors to pay earlier ones, creating the illusion of profit. The scheme collapsed in 1920, by which time he had swindled millions of dollars and left many victims ruined. Although Ponzi didn’t invent this structure, his early and highly publicised scheme cemented the term Ponzi scheme in the financial lexicon.
Words: Andrew Cattanach
At the tail end of 2025, a photograph doing the rounds on social media brought trains to a halt. The image appeared to show a collapsed railway bridge in Lancaster. Twisted metal, fractured concrete – the kind of scene that demands immediate action. Network Rail stopped services while engineers scrambled to assess the damage. There was just one problem: the bridge had not collapsed. The photograph had never existed outside a generative AI model.
The disruption was brief, but the implications were not. In a media environment where synthetic images travel faster than verification, deception no longer requires elaborate staging or specialist skill. It requires a prompt, a platform and – sometimes – nothing more sinister than carelessness. Add deliberate bad actors to the mix and it can tip from disruption into something uglier.
It’s tempting to treat this as a uniquely digital crisis. But the instinct to manufacture reality long predates the machine. Long before algorithms and AI, people were building alternative realities by hand. Some did so for money, some for prestige, some as satire, and some simply for the thrill of being believed.
Below are five very different fraudsters, each with their own methods and motivations. Taken together, their stories cast a useful light on how we navigate questions of evidence and belief. Especially in this age of synthetic media.
Piltdown Man
In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have unearthed ‘Piltdown Man’ – a set of bone fragments purported to be the fossilised remains of Britain’s earliest human ancestor. For decades, scientists treated these remains as genuine, and the discovery shaped influential models of human evolution. But doubts persisted, and it was only in 1953 that the specimen was definitively exposed as a forgery: a composite of a modern human skull and an orangutan jaw that had been deliberately aged. Dawson’s motive appears to have been personal: seeking professional recognition and prestige within the archaeological community. The hoax endured so long, in part because the forgery confirmed existing expectations about human ancestry, and because many researchers relied on casts rather than examining the original bones closely.
The Cottingley Fairies
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publicly endorsed a set of photographs purporting to show real fairies, the images gained a legitimacy that far outstripped their playful origins. The photographs, produced by two young cousins in Cottingley, Yorkshire, in 1917, depicted delicate winged figures dancing beside the girls in a sunlit garden. Public fascination endured for years, and both believers and sceptics debated the images’ authenticity. Only decades later did James Randi and others conclusively identify photographic evidence of fakery: the fairies had been cut from paper and suspended with threads. Even so, the girls continued to deflect full responsibility for many years, and the photos remain part of the cultural imagination.
The Sokal Affair
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal did something unusual: he wrote and submitted a deliberately nonsensical academic paper to the cultural studies journal Social Text. Titled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, the article married absurd claims with post-modern jargon and was accepted for publication. After it appeared, Sokal revealed the stunt in another magazine, explaining that his goal was to test whether a prestigious humanities journal would publish an article that sounded impressive but was empirically meaningless. The episode sparked an intense debate about scholarly standards, peer review and the relationship between science and the humanities.
Helen Duncan
Scottish medium Helen Duncan built a following in the 1930s and 40s by producing what she claimed was ‘ectoplasm’ during séances – a white substance that appeared to issue from her body. Investigators repeatedly demonstrated that the substance was cheesecloth or muslin, sometimes crudely shaped into spirit forms. Yet exposure did not end her career. In 1944, amid wartime tensions and following a séance in which she claimed a dead sailor had revealed the sinking of HMS Barham, she was arrested and convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 – becoming the last person imprisoned under that law.
Charles Ponzi
Charles Ponzi gave his name to one of the most infamous financial frauds in history. In the early 1920s, Ponzi promised investors extraordinary returns, claiming he could profit from international postal reply coupons – vouchers bought cheaply in one country and redeemed for stamps at a higher value in another. In truth, Ponzi didn’t invest the funds at all; he used the money from new investors to pay earlier ones, creating the illusion of profit. The scheme collapsed in 1920, by which time he had swindled millions of dollars and left many victims ruined. Although Ponzi didn’t invent this structure, his early and highly publicised scheme cemented the term Ponzi scheme in the financial lexicon.
