You have to admit, this guy has Texas-sized balls.
“Your honor, Mark said I could have half of The Facebook. Really.”
Ceglia is accused of doctoring, fabricating and destroying evidence to support a fraudulent federal lawsuit claiming he was promised a 50 percent share in Facebook, according to the criminal complaint unsealed in New York federal court on Friday.
Somewhere on my desk is my great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s receipt for Illinois when he bought it from some Indians. A lot of you will have to move when I find it!
There actually was a guy who did this. But it was Arizona he claimed was his.
James Reavis arrived in the Arizona Territory in 1880 and had a bunch of documents that showed he was the owner of a sizable land grant (almost twenty thousand square miles) issued by the Mexican government before Mexico ceded the territory to the United States. And under the terms of the treaty between the two countries, the United States was supposed to honor all pre-existing land grants. So Reavis said the land was still rightfully his.
His story was convincing enough that he was able to collect over five million dollars from people who wanted to settle the title on their land.
He would have gotten away with it, too. . . if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!
On a related point, I once had a client who claimed he developed the auction software that’s the foundation of e-Bay and he kept vowing to sue them so he’d get his rightful share. He never did.