Forgery

Forging money was punishable by death in the UK from 1697 till 1832, when the sentence was reduced to transportation.

Henry Fauntleroy was the last man hanged in Britain for forgery in 1824. He stole £20,000 in fake cheques from a bank his father founded.

The astronaut Neil Armstrong refused all requests for autographs since 1994, after he found that his signed items were selling for large amounts of money and that many forgeries were in circulation.

Xiao Yuan, 57, a curator at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in southern China, admitted in 2015 to stealing more than 140 paintings by Chinese masters from a university and replacing them with his own forgeries. He sold 125 of the exhibits for more than 34m yuan (£4m, $6m). Yuan later found out his own fakes were being stolen and replaced with yet more copies.