In the 1800s a famous fraudster invented an entirely fictitious country and then sold fraudulent land grants and bonds for it - really, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_MacGregor
There's a reason why the most famous confidence tricks have names that go back hundreds of years (eg, spanish prisoner) and there's fun named people like Soapy Smith that mastered things like mock auctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith or "Kid Dropper" named after his love of the "drop swindle" scam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Kaplan
Charles Ponzi did his stuff 100 years ago and he just lifted it from earlier con artists like Adele Spitzeder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Spitzeder
The idea that we need to "lockdown" things because we live in unprecedented times relies on someone not really reading any history. Things are relatively pretty safe these days.