The confidence game
Explores the psyches, motives, and methods of con artists to reveal why they are consistently successful, identifying common hallmarks of cons to share additional insights into the relationship between artists and victims.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
12mentions
9people
2014–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner.
It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again."
The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it.
But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
- https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Game-Fall-Every-Time/dp/01... is an interesting read
- Target was too lazy to check all the gift cards to see if they were redeemed when he called them. 4 out of 6 weren't. That's outrageous. Target should be on the hook for any unredeemed cards from the time he called to report the scam.
BTW: I recommend Maria Konnikova's book "The Confidence Game"
https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Game-Fall-Every-Time/dp/01...
- > Faced with the right con, we’re all vulnerable.
This This American Life episode (replayed this week) offers a slightly more benign version of this truism:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/323/the-super/act-two
I'm an aficionado of the genre (read Maria Konnikova's The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It Every Time recently) and I think this is my favorite con story ever.
It looks like audio isn't available at the moment but should be back online by tomorrow. If you listen, make sure you listen through to the end.
Transcript (it's Act Two): https://www.thisamericanlife.org/323/transcript
- Ah, the story of Demara. I read about him in the book "The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It... Every Time" by Maria Konnikova [1]. Recommended read.
My interest isn't so much becoming a great imposter; it is rather how to defend myself and my loved ones against cons. Ie. how to recognize them.
A fiction series about con men which I appreciated is Sneaky Pete [2] and the Spanish series La Casa De Papel (Money Heist) [3]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25387895-the-confidence-...
