“Married successfully” - this is what they usually say about women who have fooled wealthy gentlemen and entered into a marriage of convenience. However, among men, there are also many who want to improve their financial situation with the help of a profitable marriage. For some of them, it becomes a habit and the only source of income. Usually, marriage swindlers choose victims among middle-aged wealthy single ladies, many of whom are later ashamed to say that they were deceived. Therefore, no one knows the names of most of the scammers, although the most insidious of them still went down in history.
Marriage swindles were not the only "craft" of the inventive swindler Nikolai Savin. At the turn of the century, his name did not leave the pages of newspapers around the world. As a cornet of the Guards Cavalry Regiment and adjutant of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, he was caught stealing precious vestments from the bedroom of Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna. At the same time, he blamed Prince Nicholas for the incident. After that, he had to leave the service and leave Russia.
They said that Savin acted hypnotically on women and could seduce anyone. Abroad, he used this "talent": in New York, under the name of Count de Toulouse-Lautrec, the swindler married the daughter of wealthy parents and disappeared a month later with a large sum of money. And then he repeated the same scam in London. He was arrested several times for financial fraud, he spent 25 years of his life behind bars, but often he managed to get away with it. In Paris, he even managed to seduce the warden's daughter, and she helped him escape from prison.
Monte Carlo has become a favorite hunting ground for the card sharper Comte de la Rome. There he met the 40-year-old Princess de Tusson. The woman lost her head from passion and enthusiastically accepted his marriage proposal. During the honeymoon, the husband sold all of his wife's jewelry and, under the pretext of urgent business in India, disappeared in an unknown direction with the proceeds. The princess had been waiting for his return for many years. At that time, he turned the same scam in Berlin: he met the heiress of a large fortune, married her and seized all the family's securities. Having enriched himself, the swindler disappeared. When he was detained in The Hague, it turned out that he was a member of an international gang of swindlers, and his real name was Bella Klim.
In 1927, the wedding of the sister of the last German Kaiser Wilhelm II, 61-year-old Princess Victoria zu Schaumburg-Lippe, with 27-year-old Alexander Zubkov took place in Bonn. A scandal erupted in Europe. The ex-Kaiser did not consent to this marriage, all European royal and princely houses boycotted this event, but the princess lost her head and did not listen to anyone. The young husband squandered her fortune in a few months and ran into debt. To pay them off, the princess had to auction off personal property. Her heart could not stand it, and in 1929 she died. The fraudster was expelled from the country, he moved to Luxembourg, where he got a job as a waiter and introduced himself to all as "the son-in-law of the Kaiser."
The worst story was the story of Henri Desiree Landru's "blue beard". Marriage swindles were not his biggest crime - he not only deceived his victims, but also brutally killed after marriage, and burned the corpses in the oven. He searched for single ladies with the help of marriage advertisements in the newspapers. Each time he introduced himself by a different name - in total he had 96 pseudonyms. From 1914 to 1919 The “master of murder,” as he was nicknamed in the newspapers, seduced 283 and killed 11 women, for which he was executed.
And the most productive marriage swindler and polygamist is considered Giovanni Villotto (aka Nikolai Peruskov, aka Fred Jeep): from 1949 to 1981. he managed to get married 105 times! He had 50 passports with different names. In 1983 he was convicted and sent to prison, where he died in 1991.
Marriage swindlers often find victims with the help of marriage ads: how bachelors were looking for a mate and solving financial problems
