“Fakers, by their nature, remain elusive. They seek not to be discovered. They leave no fingerprints. Their signature is invisible or looks identical to another person’s. The most gifted fakers will themselves to vanish, leaving behind only the work they made: the forged painting, say, which we nonetheless admire, or the seemingly true story, which engages and entertains us no matter how incredible it seems or how false it’s proved to be. ‘The counterfeiter’s real purpose,’ Kenner writes, ‘is to efface himself, like the Flaubertian artist, so that we will draw the conclusion he wants us to draw about how his artifact came into existence.’ Believers too are elusive – though for far different reasons. They may be embarrassed or feel disinclined to relive the moment they were taken in by a faker. ‘When did you first realize you were fooled?’ is a question nobody looks forward to answering, but for years now I have worked under the assumption that the question is in fact worth asking, and asking anew, and that the answers can tell us much about what we believe and what we want, why we trust and why we still get duped.”

(Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters, and other great pretenders, p. 84.)