A 2006 arrest revealed someone forging the signature of a master forger onto fake paintings, the perfect emblem of Konrad Kujau's legacy. This deep dive traces how a clumsy petty thief escalated into one of history's most audacious frauds.

We follow Kujau from extreme poverty and comically incompetent early crimes to his discovery that a fabricated backstory could multiply an artifact's value, culminating in 61 volumes of forged diaries that fooled a major magazine.

• Aging paper with tea bags and using rub-on plastic letters
• Exploiting collectors who desperately wanted the fakes to be real
• The fictional East German smuggling network he invented
• Journalist Gerd Heidemann skimming millions as the middleman
• Ultraviolet light and modern paper whitener exposing the fraud