plan in which they would receive a cash advance to ship a load of corn from Syracuse to Athens . Due to the dangers associated with shipping , the buyer would take on full risk if the shipment did n't make it to Athens , so if the boat sank Xenothemis and Hegestratos could keep their cash . Instead of loading the ship with expensive corn , the conniving pair made a plan to sail an empty ship out to sea for a few days , then sink it and escape in lifeboats . Since the boat itself was insured , this plot seemed airtight , and the potential profit was great . Unfortunately , though , the boat 's other passengers allegedly caught wind of the scheme during the attempting scuttling of the ship . These passengers were understandably a bit peeved at Hegestratos ' attempts to drown them for his own financial gain . Hegestratos panicked and jumped overboard , at which point he drowned . Unable to sink the ship by himself , Xenothemis had to sail on to the port , at which point the buyer , Protos , wanted to know why his shipload of
-LRB- Mental Floss -RRB- -- Starting a legitimate business is hard , boring work . There 's paperwork to fill out , employees to hire , and all sorts of other drudgery , not to mention the biggest hurdle of all : providing a product or service for which customers are willing to pay . President Ulysses S. Grant foiled a gold scam . In all likelihood , it would be much easier to just stumble upon some clever scam to line your pockets . Or so it would seem . As many aspiring scam artists quickly learn , when a business scam fails , it tends to fail in rather grand fashion . Just ask any of these four teams of not-so-smooth operators . A corny sea story Xenothemis and Hegestratos may not have been the world 's first white-collar criminals , but they were certainly noteworthy for their incompetence . In 360 B.C. , the pair stumbled upon what seemed like a killer plan to make some quick cash . Shipping was extremely risky at the time , and boats went down at sea with alarming frequency . To exploit this uncertainty , Xenothemis and Hegestratos devised a