Fake sultan was scamming a Miami billionaire. Then he ate pork

If you make your fake name distinct enough, you could also get legitimate sounding domains and put up articles about yourself, and they will show up on the front page of a search on your name. Barney on "How I Met Your Mother" did this:

http://www.lorenzovonmatterhorn.com/

http://bigbusinessjournal.com/

http://www.balloonexplorersclub.com/

http://www.extremitiesquarterly.com/

Of course, he also did social media:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzovonmatterhorn/

I had not realized that LinkedIn allowed fake people. In this case, not only is it a fake person, it is a fake person made up by a fictional person!

And that fictional person is also on LinkedIn [1], which is also something I didn't realize they allowed, but looking around I see a lot of fictional characters, such as Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler from "Big Bang Theory", Tony Stark and Obadiah Stane from "Iron Man", and most of the staff of Dunder Mifflin.

Anyway, you could do the fake article thing before the net, but it took some real effort. There was a con man in the late 19th century who pulled an investment scam in a western town. He told people to check out the stories written about his company in leading financial publications from back east. Of course no one in the town personally subscribed, so they had to go to the town library, and there they found there were indeed positive articles about him, and of course those were fake issues he had printed that added articles about him to the real issues. A nice touch was that on the way out of town with his victims money, he stopped by the library and replaced the modified magazines with the originals.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/barneystinson/