Philip Arnold was a confidence trick

Confidence trick

A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. A confidence artist is an individual working alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty and honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility,...

ster from Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown, Kentucky

Elizabethtown is a city in and the county seat of Hardin County, Kentucky, United States. The population was 28,531 at the 2010 census, making it the eleventh-largest city in the state...

, Kentucky

Kentucky

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

, and the brains behind the legendary diamond hoax of 1872

Diamond hoax of 1872

The diamond hoax of 1872 was a swindle in which a pair of prospectors sold a false American diamond deposit to prominent businessmen in San Francisco and New York...

, which fooled people into investing in a phony diamond

Diamond

In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...

 mining operation. He managed to walk away from the hoax with more than half a million dollars.

Arnold opened a bank in Kentucky, and died a few years later from the results of a shootout with a rival banker.

In the 1963 television series The Great Adventure

The Great Adventure

The Great Adventure is the fifth album released by Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman. The album was released on November 18, 1992 by Sparrow Records. It went Gold in just under seven months, being certified June 15, 1993....

there was an episode based on this fraud called The Great Diamond Mountain. Arnold was played by actor John Fiedler

John Fiedler

John Donald Fiedler was an American voice actor and character actor in stage, film, television and radio. He was slight, balding, and bespectacled, with a distinctive, high-pitched voice and a career lasting more than 55 years.He is best remembered for four roles: as the nervous Juror #2 in 12...

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