Thérèse Humbert (1856–after 1936) was a French female fraudster, who pretended to be an heir of an imaginary American millionaire named Robert Crawford. Biography Humbert was born Thérèse Daurignac, a peasant girl in Aussonne, Midi-Pyrénées, France. As a child, she once convinced her friends to pool their jewelry so that she could fool others into believing she was wealthy. She married Frédéric Humbert, son of the mayor of Toulouse. Soon after, she began to tell a tale that she had received an unusual inheritance. Humbert claimed that in 1879, when she was in a train, she heard groans from the next compartment. She entered into it by climbing along the outside of the train. There she found a man who was having a heart attack. When she had helped him with her smelling salts, the man told her he was an American millionaire named Robert Henry Crawford, and that he was eternally grateful and would reward her some day. Two years later in 1881, she received a letter stating that Crawford had died and made her beneficiary of his will. The will stated that the Humberts were to look after the family fortune in a safe that should remain sealed until her younger sister Marie was old enough to marry one of Crawford's two nephews, Henry Crawford. With this story, Humbert obtained a huge loan using the supposed inheritance as a collateral. She moved to Paris with her husband and bought an elaborate house in . Humbert gathered much influence, fame and wealth. Her salon became a center of socializing. Humbert and her associates, other members of the Humbert family, borrowed money against the nonexistent inheritance. They lived in luxury for about 20 years, spending their money on flowers, elaborate dresses and banquets. Eventually they had to borrow more money to cover the previous loans. There were suspicions, but nobody was able to prove the story false. In 1883, newspaper published a skeptical article, but Humbert's father-in-law, who at the time was the minister of justice, supported her story. Humbert claimed that the Crawfords had sued him so that she would have to place her part of the inheritance to bank. After lengthy litigation, during which the two Crawford nephews, Henry and Robert, appeared in court, the court ruled that the locked safe should remain in Humbert's possession. When Jules Bizat, official for the French bank, asked Humbert how she