16. Seventeenth-Century England’s Greatest Conman
Few confidence tricksters have had as interesting a resume as did William Chaloner (1650 – 1699). The son of a Warwickshire weaver, he was a willful child who showed no interest in his father’s trade, so he was sent to apprentice to a nail maker in Birmingham. Chaloner had no interest in that line of work, either, but he did get drawn to another type of metalwork that Birmingham was famous for at the time: counterfeiting coins. He took to it like a duck to water, and soon gained expertise in producing fake groats – a coin worth four pence.
In the 1680s, Chaloner headed to London, where he sold dildos, and got started on a new career as psychic and a quack doctor selling fake miracle cures. He also gained a reputation as a particularly successful detective, who had a keen nose for finding and recovering stolen items. That success probably had something to do with the fact that Chaloner had stolen those items himself, before offering to “find them” in exchange for a reward. Eventually, he tired of those small-time penny ante scams, and decided to get into something far more lucrative: go back to counterfeiting, but this time, on an industrial scale.