For more than 500 years con artists have been parting the greedy, gullible, unwary or soft-hearted from their money. From the very first recorded con - the Elizabethan-era 'Spanish Prisoner Scam' - to today's hi-tech online swindles, grifters have become ever-more inventive in their scope, scale and ambition. Their stories are remarkable - from the tale of Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a fictional South American country, raised international loans on behalf of its 'government' and sold much of its (non-existent) land to would-be settlers in the 1820s, to Peter Foster, the king of bogus slimming 'cures' and friend of Page 3 models and a certain Prime Minister's wife.