Oscar Hartzell sold shares in a $22 billion Sir Francis Drake estate that did not exist, and about 70,000 Midwesterners paid

Sir Francis Drake died in 1596. In 1915 two promoters, Sudie Whiteaker and Milo Lewis, told Iowans named Drake that his estate had never been settled and had grown for 300 years. Oscar Hartzell's mother put in about $6,000. Hartzell joined the promoters, then took over. By the 1920s he lived in London and ran some 20 agents in the United States, who mailed him money. He said he had found Drake's only living heir and that the estate was worth $22,500,000,000. Contributors were promised at least $1,000 for each dollar. In 1922 the British Home Office said there was no unclaimed Drake estate. A U.S. postal inspector, working with Scotland Yard, broke his network, and Britain deported Hartzell in early 1933. A federal jury in Sioux City, Iowa, convicted him of mail fraud in November 1933. He was sentenced to ten years. The Eighth Circuit affirmed on 16 August 1934, finding he had received about $700,000 to $800,000 over ten years. His agents kept collecting after the verdict. In November 1935 a second trial in Chicago charged 41 defendants with taking $1,350,000 from about 70,000 people. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and said he was Drake. He died in federal custody in 1943. In 2026 no money from the scheme has been reported recovered for the contributors^†.