Stephen Kellaway
While on a visit to Russia in 2008, Stephan Kellaway and his wife tried a risky scheme: she reported him dead and then returned to their home in Britain and presented the Russian death certificate she’d obtained for her husband. Two years later, Stephen came forward, admitting his death had been faked in order to duck an investigation into insurance fraud (he had made an insurance claim on his business, which he then used to pay for his wife’s breast augmentation surgery). The Daily Mail reports that Kellaway was inspired by John Darwin’s faked death.
Lenin Carballido
This politician pulled off quite the electoral feat: Lenin Carballido was elected mayor of a village in Mexico in 2013, three years after he had ‘died’ due to complications from diabetes. When his election news spread, police began investigating and determined he’d faked the death to escape rape accusations dating back to 2004.
Arkady Babchenko
In 2018, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko dramatically faked his own death with the help of Ukraine security services. A contract had been taken out on Babchenko’s life, so the security forces planned an ‘assassination’ in his apartment, with a fake assailant and loads of pig blood. At the morgue, Babchenko cleaned up and watched the news of his death on television. Once the threat was eliminated, Babchenko revealed the truth. “We are happy that Arkady is alive and that his attempted murder was prevented,” a media watchdog group told the Guardian. Nevertheless, “everybody now feels manipulated.”
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Source: RD.com
