Have You Been Conned?

The public, including me, loves stories about con artists. Just do a quick search on movies about con artists, and you can quickly get a list of “50+ Best” There are shorter lists, but on all of them I looked at, The Sting is at the very top. If you’re too young to have seen it, find it on Prime or Netflix and watch it. In fact I might watch it again. It’s that good.

One con artist movie I loved but have never watched again is The Spanish Prisoner. Directed by the legendary David Mamet, I double-dog-dare-you to figure out what is going on in that flick. Once or twice I thought I knew, but you’ll have to watch it to the very end if you want to verify your solution. And I do mean the very end. Golly.

Others that are more fun than that one include Oceans 11 and Trading Places. In fact a lot of the con artist movies have an element — sometimes very strong — of comedy. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of my favorites for both the con and the comedy.

Of course there are TV series on the topic as well, with Leverage coming to mind, but back in the day I enjoyed White Collar, with The Mentalist right up there as well. A fun current series with the con artists being good (as in Leverage) is the Canadian show Wild Cards.

Following in the wake of con artists are undercover police officers. They are, in fact, doing just what a con artist does: persuading people to believe something that is not true.

Unlike real life, though, most of the cons in the genre we enjoy are perpetrated on bad people who need to be taken down. In real life, good people get hurt, too.

What we like, and what we don’t like

What we like is the bad guys getting what they deserve. We also like “the game” and how it is played, along with the skill of the artists.

The “con” part is short for “confidence,” which was used because gaining trust is the essential part of the practice. Without gaining someone’s trust, there is no “con.”

The term has been around since the 19th century, with “con artist” first showing up around 1878. While assuredly people “conned” other people well before then (I can name a couple of great examples from the Bible), the phrase only came into use a couple of hundred years ago but continues to grow steadily in usage.

What we don’t like is the moral ambiguity of con games. When presented in story form, though, we are convinced that the bad people are bad and that traditional means (the law) can’t get to them. Those are stories, of course.

What we really don’t like is that we — all of us — can be conned. Most of us have been, somewhere along the way, and if there is anything that will make you feel foolish and ashamed, it is being the target of a con.

The biggest real life con on record belonged to Bernie Madoff. He was a legitimate financier and former chairman of the Nasdaq exchange, so gaining trust from investors was easier. Ultimately, using that trust and his knowledge of trading, he defrauded thousands of investors out of more than $65 billion dollars, and he did that over perhaps a 15 year period. The government recovered (by selling his properties and boats) about $4.3 billion of that and returned it to some of the investors.

Could it happen to you? Yes.

Bernie Madoff used a Ponzi scheme to defraud investors. Invented by and later named for Charles Ponzi (pictured), who created his method in 1918. Madoff used the money from later investors to pay off early investors, adding to his credibility. At least one person documented a lot of Madoff’s activity and sent it to the SEC in 2000, but the SEC did not pursue it. He confessed to his sons in 2008 and was then arrested.

A Ponzi scheme, as do several other cons, relies not just on people trusting the con artist, but also on their vulnerabilities. That could be a desire for easy money, and often is.

Second to that desire, perhaps, is the desire to help other people. Many modern day cons/scams have been run by people who say that someone else needs help. One common version of that is known as the grandparent scam. It is still being run today.

One of our friends shared that his mother, in her late 80’s, had recently been scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars over a few months through a fake organization pretending to support political candidates. The victim only made one or two small donations using a credit card, but that was enough for the sophisticated scammers.

Lest you think it is only the elderly at risk, the Wall Street Journal posted a story a few days ago about an email phisher who scammed a town in South Carolina out of $545,598.30 using what is called a “business email compromise” scam. Last year that scam cost businesses as much as $3 billion dollars.

Trust

All of this damages our ability to trust people. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it’s not. Of course the scammers and con artists know that and often use tools like AI to add credibility to their story. (Mimicking the voice of a grandchild, for instance.) So your first line of defense is always trust. If someone is working too hard to get that from you, be extra careful.

Additionally, mitigate your own vulnerability by using reason more than emotion and by never acting too quickly on some request that has been made, especially by someone you don’t know.

There are bad actors, but the whole world is not out to get you. There is a lot of good out there and a lot of good people. Be one of them, and always…

Do good. It’s in you!

P.S. The FBI has a helpful website about common frauds and scams. Check it out and get to know some of the schemes con artists and scammers are using.