Jan 17, 2023
Ponzi Schemes, 3 Card Monte, & Flim Flam Men – The Business of Con Artists
BRT S04 EP02 (165) 1-15-2023
What We Learned This Week
- Famous Cons - Ponzi Scheme, Brooklyn Bridge, 3 Card Monte, Spanish Prisoner, Landlord, False Good Samaritan, Fiddle Game….
- Psychology of the Scam & The Mark (Victim) – preying on people’s trust, greed & politeness
- Magic - Art of Miss-direction & Deception, & how 3 Card Monte works
- Con Artists in Movies - The Sting, Wolf of Wall St, Ocean's 11, Grifters, American Hustle, Hustler, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Boiler Room....
Guest: Eric Almassy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-almassy-4b10097
Eric is a regional sales director, & also a part time Actor
Notes:
Seg 1 – What is a Con? What is a Confidence Man?
Examples of cons – Spanish Prisoner, ponzi scheme, landlord, False Good Samaritan, 3 card monte
Famous Cons – Ponzi Scheme, Brooklyn Bridge, Madoff, FTX Crypto
Sell Brooklyn Bridge – George C Parker
https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/conman-sold-brooklyn-bridge.htm
Parker was so good at his job that he managed to "sell" the Statue of Liberty, Madison Square Garden, Ulysses S. Grant's tomb, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as four lots in City Hall Park for $25,000. But he couldn't avoid getting caught, and he went to jail several times for larceny, forgery, and impersonating a police officer.
False Good Samaritan
There might not be any simpler or more ancient con than the so-called “false Good Samaritan”. It usually involves a team of two con men working in tandem, and the victim is usually a lone person walking a city street at night. The first con man approaches the person and mugs them, stealing their wallet or purse and taking off down the street. The second con man, posing as a passerby, will give chase to the mugger, tackle them, and get back the wallet. The mugger, of course, always manages to escape during the fray.
The false Good Samaritan will then return the wallet or purse to the mark, who will have been witness to the entire performance. The hope is that the grateful victim will repay the con man for his help with some kind of cash reward, which they can then split with the mugger later on. When sold correctly and performed on the right kind of person, this con is capable of earning the grifters even more money than they would have ever gotten from just keeping the stolen wallet.
Spanish Prisoner / Nigerian Prince
Ever gotten one of those junk e-mails from a person claiming to be a Nigerian Princess in need of quick cash? If so, then you’re familiar with the Spanish Prisoner, which is a classic form of “advance fee fraud” that attempts to trick unsuspecting marks by promising them a big payday down the road. The scam dates all the way back to the early 1900s, when it was often used against wealthy businessmen. This is how it would go down: after gaining his mark’s trust, a con man would intimate that he was in correspondence with the family of a fabulously wealthy person of high social class who was being imprisoned in Spain for a crime they didn’t commit.
Fearing scandal, the prisoner has not released his name or case to the public, and is relying on private means to generate the money to secure his release. With this in mind, the mark would be told that any money he contributed to help in the cause would be paid back with huge interest down the road. In some variations, it would even be implied that the person would get to marry the Spanish Prisoner’s beautiful daughter. Naturally, any money the victim gave would inevitably disappear, and when possible the con man would even try and get his victim to contribute more cash by telling them that a daring rescue attempt needed to be funded.
Ponzi Scheme / Pyramid Scheme
If current events have proven anything, it’s that there is no more potentially profitable con game than the Ponzi scheme. The trick dates back hundreds of years, but it was popularized by Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant to the U.S. who swindled investors out of millions in the early 1900s before being arrested.
The modern Ponzi scheme is a form of investment fraud in which a fake or corrupt stockbroker uses the money of his new investors to pay the imaginary returns of his old ones. Initial investments with the fake broker might yield enormous returns for the people being conned, but in reality their money has not been invested in anything–the con man has simply been putting it all into a bank account. Any time someone wants to withdraw money, or if he has to pay the returns of his old investors, the con man simply uses the money he’s gotten from new investors to do it. Nothing is actually being invested, won, or lost in the market.
The con man is simply giving that impression so that people keep handing over more and more cash. Because it can only grow so far, any Ponzi scheme is destined to eventually collapse under its own weight, so the con man usually pulls a disappearing act after collecting enough money, leaving the investors with nothing but the fake returns they received to keep them involved in the swindle. Undoubtedly the most famous recent example involved Bernard Madoff, a New York financier who engineered a Ponzi scheme estimated to be in the neighborhood of $65 billion. Madoff was eventually caught and sentenced to 150 years in prison, but not before pulling of what is essentially the biggest con game of all time.
Three Card Monte
One of the classic short cons, three-card monte is a card game that uses sleight of hand and trickery to swindle victims out of small amounts of cash. It’s one of the oldest cons around, and dates back to “the shell game,” a similar scheme that was popular during the Middle Ages. The game itself is deceivingly simple. Three cards are placed faced down on a flat surface, usually two black jacks and a red queen. The dealer shows the players the red queen, and then proceeds to thoroughly shuffle the cards to make it difficult to tell where it is.
Players then bet on whether they can pick the queen out of the three cards. It sounds easy enough, but the game is more or less impossible to beat, because a good dealer can use sleight of hand to switch the cards at will, and can easily decide who wins or loses. In more sophisticated set ups, the whole game is a fake, and the other supposed “players” are in on the con. One of these conspirators will approach the mark and pretend to give them inside information on how to beat the game, enticing them to make a larger bet. Since street gambling is quite clearly illegal, any time a victim begins to suspect the game might be a cheat, the con men simply pretend to see the police coming, pack up their game, and make a break for it.
Wire Game
Made famous by the movie The Sting, the wire game was a complex fraud that required a large group of con men to work in concert in order to pull it off. The group of grifters would open up a fake “wire store,’ which is a kind of bookie where bets could be placed on horse races. A victim, usually a man of considerable wealth, would then be brought in and given some fake insider information that a particular horse was a sure thing to win the race.
If the con men sold the mark well enough, the hope was that they would place a huge bet with the fake bookie at the wire store. From here, the con can go any number of ways, but in the most popular version some sort of mistake occurs, or confusion over the outcome of the race (which, of course, never actually took place) leads to the bet being declared a loss for the hapless victim.
Embarrassing Check
The embarrassing check con is a well-known means of legally getting money from victims by playing off of their innate feelings of shame. The con men open a fake business with an overtly explicit title that supposedly sells sex toys or other pornographic material, but buyers are told that any purchases they make will be routed through a separate company with a much more innocuous name.
After taking orders and collecting payments, the company then sends out letters explaining that a shipping error or some other issue has made it impossible for them to deliver on their product. They enclose a legitimate check refund, only this time the highly graphic name of the company is clearly emblazoned on the check, the idea of course being that a certain percentage of the customers will be too ashamed or embarrassed to ever cash it.
Fiddle Game / Ring Game
Many of the best cons work because of the inherent greed of the person being tricked, and the fiddle game is one of the best examples. It requires two con men to work, and is designed to take place in a restaurant. One of the con men poses as an old man eating dinner. When he gets his bill, the man approaches the owner and explains that he forgot his wallet back at his hotel. He promises to go get it, and as collateral leaves behind an old fiddle or violin, explaining that he is a traveling musician and that it is his sole source of income.
After the old man leaves, a second con man who has been sitting nearby approaches the owner and asks to see the fiddle, saying that he is a dealer in rare instruments. After inspecting the fiddle, the man pronounces it a highly rare and valuable piece of work, worth thousands of dollars. He then pretends to be in a hurry and leaves, but not before giving the mark his card and telling him to call if the man is interested in selling. The old man will return shortly thereafter with the money for his meal. If the con men have sold the trick well enough, the victim, believing that he will be able to sell it to the fake instrument dealer for a huge profit, will attempt to buy the fiddle off of the old man for a few hundred dollars. Of course, the number on the card will prove to be a fake, and the victim will inevitably be left with a worthless violin.
Landlord
Sometimes real estate can be more valuable than gold. That’s the premise of the Landlord Scam, in which a con artist assumes control of a vacant or abandoned home, and then advertises the property for an especially attractive price point. The unsuspecting victim rents the property from the con artist, who collects a security deposit as well as the first and last months' rent, and then disappears. In some cases, the con artist may even rent the same property to multiple victims, leading to mass confusion (and a couple of fistfights) on moving day.
https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-con-games.php
Top 10 Con Games Explained
By EVAN ANDREWS September 16, 2009 / Updated:March 26, 2019
Famous Con Artists:
Charles Ponzi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi
Bernie Madoff - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
SBF – FTX Crypto / Alameda - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried
Seg. 2 – Psychology of a Con
Why do people fall for cons?
What con artists prey on, psych traits of victims
More examples of cons, and how mark plays into it
Grifters: The 7 Psychological Principles That Con Artists Use
Distraction – Attention is like spotlight, which means when it’s pointing in one direction it pretty much ignores everything else. Except people don’t realise how little information coming in from the outside world we actually process.Naturally you don’t notice what you don’t notice, plus the mind is designed to fill in the gaps for us.
But con artists do know and almost every con uses some kind of distraction.
The classic example is ‘Three-card Monte‘ sometimes called ‘Find the Lady’, a rigged card game in which the aim is to find one card out of three after the grifter shuffles them around.
At the heart of this hustle is the orchestration of a crowd of onlookers who the mark (that’s you and me) thinks are all fellow punters, but who are actually in on the game.- aka: polite mugging
Social Compliance - The classic study showing how compliant we are, especially when told to do things by an authority figure, is known as the Milgram experiment. Grifters know all about this and happily exploit our automatic deference to authority figures.
People will hand over credit cards to people they think are waiters, car keys to people they think are car park attendants
Herd Principle - People are sheep: they can’t help following each other.
The classic study, known as the Asch conformity experiment was conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s showing that people will deny evidence from their own eyes to fit in with others.
In the Three-card Monte con, the crowd of shills around the game creates the herd for the mark to follow.
Online there are all kinds of tricks people can use to make others think there is a herd when actually there is only one person.
The practice of ‘astroturfing’ means creating multiple online identities to fake grass-roots support for a politician.In peer-to-peer networks the multiple identities created by people trying to influence them are known as Sybils. Whether online or offline, though, group psychology exerts an enormous influence over us.
Exploit other’s dishonesty - Fear is the mind-killer.
Con artists know that people are fearful and play on this fact. Some cons involve selling goods to marks that are used for illegal purposes.Marks are discouraged from reporting the scam because they would be implicating themselves and the grifter wins both ways.
Deception - People are easily tricked, even when they think they are being careful.
Grifters take advantage of the fact that most people go along with their expectations of what will happen in any given situation. If the grifter’s behaviour fits the situation then people will accept what they say.
Leverage need or greed - Once grifters know what people want, even if it doesn’t exist, they are in a position to manipulate them. They will play on people’s desperation; unfortunately the more desperate people are, the easier they are to con.
Time Pressure - Classic studies of how people make decisions under time pressure demonstrates what grifters already know: when there’s no time to think people rely on short cuts and emotional responses to a situation.
https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/07/grifters-con-artists-7.php
Grifters: The 7 Psychological Principles That Con Artists Use
Message from Dr Jeremy Dean
Seg. 3 – 3 Card Monte, Magic, and the Art of Deception
Hustler, people in crowd are in on the con, there to distract you
Art of the con, look and act, all in to sell it
Miss-direction, follow the card and how magic works
The mark is looking at the wrong thing
Magic – good looking assistant is miss-direction
That’s the Trick
There’s a scene in the movie The Prestige when the 2 young apprentice magicians go to see an older magician to learn his ‘Trick’. When the older magician is on stage he’s doing amazing feats of strength. Then they get a watch him after the show get into a carriage, he seems like a crippled feeble old man who needs help.
One magician says the other magician – ‘This is the Trick. This is the performance. This is why no one can detect his method. Total devotion to his art. Lot of self sacrifice.’
The ‘Trick’ is off stage, he’s always acting like a crippled old man. It’s simple, not easy.
We often look for something that’s not there, the big secret, when it’s actually just in front of our faces. Always more simple than we think.
We’re looking for the big trick, how to get rich in a moment. When the actual trick, is doing the work daily, weekly, monthly, for years. You hone the craft, measure your progress, and adjust over time. Respect the craft, as there is no overnight success.
Seg. 4 – Cons in Movies
The Sting – wire game, and gambling, hustle
The Hustler – pool movie with gambling
Wolf of Wall Street – pump and dump scheme with stocks or investments
Also in Boiler Room (based on Wolf of Wall St)
Oceans 11
The Cons/Hustles/Scams in "Ocean's 11" - What do the names mean?
bkkshadow (70)in #film • 2016
A Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, 2 Jethro's, a Leon Spinks & an Ella Fitzgerald.
https://steemit.com/film/@bkkshadow/the-cons-hustles-scams-in-ocean-s-11-what-do-the-names-mean
The Grifters
In grifting, there are two types of scams: The Long Con & The Short Con. The names refer to the amount of time they take to correctly pull off, which is, ideally, a direct corollary to how lucrative the payout at the end is for the con-man (or woman).
Let’s talk about the lies. This movie is lousy with ‘em. Obviously the assorted grifters are lying as a profession. That’s lying to other people, and that’s a given. On top of that, they’re lying to each other.
https://www.moviejawn.com/home/2017/5/2/the-grifters
More: American Hustle, Trading Places, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Focus,
Matchstick Men, A Fish Called Wanda, Talented Mr. Ripley, Paper Moon,
Bowfinger, Brothers Bloom, Now You See me, Nightmare Alley, I Care A Lot
https://movieweb.com/con-artist-movies/
Here Are Some of the Best Movies About Con Artists
There's something captivating about tales depicting suave and slick con artists who manage to execute calculating and thrilling schemes.
BY RACHEL JOHNSON JUL 29, 2022
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BRT Hollywood: HERE
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