Examples include the diamond hoax of 1872 and the Bre-X gold fraud of the mid-1990s. During gold rushes, scammers would load shotguns with gold dust and shoot into the sides of the mine to give the appearance of a rich ore, thus 'salting the mine'. Salting or 'salting the mine' are terms for a scam in which gemstones or gold ore are planted in a mine or on the landscape, duping the mark into purchasing shares in a worthless or non-existent mining company. By the time victims realized that they had been scammed, Lustig was long gone. Lustig stocked the machine with six to nine genuine $100 bills for demonstration purposes, but after that it produced only blank paper. A victim, sensing huge profits and untroubled by ethical implications, would buy the machine for a high price-from $25,000 to $102,000. Victor Lustig, a con artist born in Austria-Hungary, designed and sold a 'money box' which he claimed could print $100 bills using blank sheets of paper. Variations include the pyramid scheme, the Ponzi scheme, and the matrix scheme. Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied these include fake franchises, real estate 'sure things', get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, foreign exchange fraud, Nigerian money scams, fraudulent treasure hunts, and charms and talismans.
