“Who wants to be a millionaire?” The Man Who Frauded His Competition

At first, Ingram’s performance was underwhelming. He could only answer 7 of the first 15 questions correctly and used two of his 3 wild card rights.

However somehow he kept giving the correct answers And it came down to the last question.

The 1 million pound question was as follows: By what name is one hundred zeros following a number known?

Answer options included ‘Googol’, ‘Megatron’, ‘Gigabit’ and ‘Nanomole’. Ingram, he initially said ‘Googol’ but changed his answer within a few seconds He said ‘Megatron’ and then fixed his answer again as ‘Googol’.

Ingram’s Upon this success, those in the studio became suspicious. Because while thinking about the questions, Charles Ingram named each option over and over again, and usually arrived at the correct answer by saying “I guess” or “maybe.”

Whatever the question, Ingram would read all four possible answers over and over again.

For example “Which country’s cheese is Emmental from?” chronologically when asked “It could be France, it could be Italy, or maybe it’s the Netherlands.” He was repeating his answers like this.

Moreover, for each correct answer choice Several people in the studio were noticed coughing. This pushed the producers to take action.

No, it wasn’t a normal cough as you thought.

in the studio A total of 192 coughs were recorded by microphones. 1.5 years later, the case was taken to court and quickly turned into a tabloid event.

The big fraud story was very sensational. In the end, all 3 defendants were found guilty and 2 documentaries were shot on this incident, but the Ingrams never admitted their crimes.

As a result of the investigations, Ingram and 2 accomplices were tried.

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