1. “Faeries” faked out one of the best-known mystery writers of the English language, who was taken in by photographs of wood nymphs snapped in 1917. The pranksters responsible? A pair of schoolgirls, ages 9 and 15.

2. Perpetual motion machines never run out of steam. In 1813, a schemer charged gullible New Yorkers $1 each to see this marvel. It took a famous American inventor to expose the hoax: The contraption, he revealed, was powered by a bearded old man turning a crank in the attic.

3. In 1862, The Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada, printed the first of many hoaxes penned by this famous humorist. A local judge, the article averred, had held an inquest to determine the cause of death of a man found fused in bedrock.

4. Another world-famous writer fabricated a tale in 1844 of an Atlantic balloon crossing completed in a mere three days. Destitute, with just $4.50 to his name, the legendary master of the macabre blithely sold his spun-from-whole-cloth story to the New York Sun.

5. Discovered in 1912, these fragments of skull and jaw bone were billed as the missing link between ape and humans. On display for four decades at the Natural History Museum in London, they were only exposed as fakes in 1953. The scammers were never definitely identified.

6. This merry prankster has turned the tables on many a news organization over the past 30 years, pretending to be a gypsy upset over the term “gypsy moth,” the owner of a dog meat soup company, a psychic attorney and a priest pedaling a portable confession booth promising “Religion on the Move for People on the Go!” (We’re looking just for the scammer’s name, not for a specific scam.)

7. A world-famous aviation pioneer was lured out of seclusion to debunk his “authorized autobiography” – actually written by a first-class forger. “I don’t remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be,” the reclusive industrialist told the press. His bogus biographer was sentenced to two years in jail.

8. A dozen years later, Germany’s Stern magazine paid $3.8 million for 62 volumes of diaries written in the hand of history’s most infamous dictator. Among other aging techniques, the forger stained his pages with tea leaves and smashed the volumes with a hammer.

9. In 1977, a Stone Age tribe was discovered on the island of Mindanao. The childlike natives lived in caves, wore orchid leaves and spoke an unrecognizable tongue. Nearly a decade passed before the hoax was discovered. By then the government minister in charge was long gone, along with millions collected to “protect” the tribe.

10. Genesis states “there were giants on the earth.” And for a brief time, they left a fossil record. In 1869, well-diggers unearthed an 11-foot petrified man near Syracuse, New York. So entranced was the public with this Goliath that a world-famous showman, unable to purchase it, commissioned his own gypsum giant and declared it the original.

›› Contest Rules We are looking for the names of scams and the scammers responsible. For clue 1, add the famous victim. For clue 2, give both the jokester and the debunker. Up to five $30 gift certificates from Borders Books and Music will be awarded to the doubting Thomases who correctly complete the puzzle. If more than five perfect entries are received, winners will be drawn by lot.

Send your entry by no later than March 15 to The Last Word. c/o USC Trojan Family Magazine. University of Southern California. Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790 Submissions by fax (213-821-1100) and e-mail <magazines@usc.edu> are also welcome.