Description :

James Addison Reavis

James Addison Reavis is an American fraudster and a forger who claimed to be the Baron of Arizona with an ownership to 48,000 km2 of land in Arizona. Reavis was an excellent forger with a real estate background who used his skills in forging land documents for sale. He came to be called the “Baron of Arizona” by forging land documents which he collected to retrieve the lands of his partner who died.

Reavis claimed himself to be the last baron on the Arizona lineage and the owner of lands owned by fictional barons. To make his claims and scams seems true he created an heiress for Peralta region in Arizona and even married her.

He sold those land promissory notes for nearly $5 million in the year 1882 which amounts to about $165 million today. Half of those lands were taken under the custody of the U.S government for which he sued the government for a loss pay of $11 million. The U.S government then dug deep about the Baron of Arizona and Reavis, in which the frauds of  Reavis were unmasked. “He was fined $5000 and was sentenced to 2 years in prison.”