The Neurological Basis of Con Games 218
Hugh Pickens writes "If we humans have such big brains, how can we get conned? Neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak has an interesting post on Psychology Today in which he recounts how he was the victim of a classic con called 'The Pigeon Drop' when he was a teenager and explains how con men take advantage of the Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System, called THOMAS, a powerful brain circuit that releases the neurochemical oxytocin when we are trusted and induces a desire to reciprocate the trust we have been shown. 'The key to a con is not that you trust the con man, but that he shows he trusts you. Con men ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable,' writes Zak. 'Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others — this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers.' Zak's laboratory studies have shown that two percent of the college students he tested are 'unconditional nonreciprocators' who have learned how to simulate trustworthiness and would make good con men. Watch a video of Skeptics Society founder Michael Shermer running the classic pigeon drop on an unsuspecting victim and see if you wouldn't be taken in by a professional con man yourself."
Explanation (Score:4, Interesting)
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs explains it eloquently: "You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half of 'em are even dumber than THAT."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's all about greed (Score:5, Interesting)
And a confidence game is a scam that involves gaining someone's confidence and then using it to defraud them, which is exactly what every one of the examples above are.
Thanks for the unecessary condescendation though. Look! Another con word.
Re:Not me. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't easily trust strangers who inexplicably trust me. I'm not easily conned. I guess I have a doubting THOMAS.
I wouldn't have fallen for it for one reason only: I would not have touched the money or the envelope with the money in it. Or the envelope I thought it had the money in it. If there is no personal information in the wallet, yet it seems loaded with money, my paranoia kicks in. If there is personal information inside, then I'd rather find the owner and hand it over.
Somehow, I'd rather earn $300 than steal $1000, though I'd give it back even without the finder's fee.
Besides, I remember American Gods and two-man cons.
You really cannot cheat an honest man. Not until you become greedy do these tricks work.
Re:Unsurprising find? (Score:1, Interesting)
Been playing with computers all my life. They've warped the way I think. I input data FOO to a system, and the system gives me result BAR.
Other people are also processing systems. I'm a processing system. And while I'm relatively unskilled at hacking them, there are hackers who specialize in hacking them.
I don't trust computers because they're too easily manipulated by skilled hackers. I don't trust humans, for precisely the same reason.
On a network, you manage the risk by trying anticipate all the ways in which you could be hacked, by filtering out as much unsolicited traffic as practical, by not trusting externally-originated content, and as a last resort, by pulling the plug out of the wall and reimaging the OS after a breach.
In wetware, now we're back to this morning's CS/women thread.
Ponzi Scheme In Colombia (Score:2, Interesting)
A huge Ponzi network just fell in Colombia, encompassing many cities and more than a billion dollars in loses:
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=320773&CategoryId=12393 [laht.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_JZL9pC6-8 [youtube.com]
I've heard somthing similar also happened in Bolivia. I think it's all about greed/dreams of easy money.
Re:I feel I must apologize for the truth. (Score:5, Interesting)
Truth (or trust) serum? (Score:4, Interesting)
If, as the article claims, oxytocin "induces a desire to reciprocate [trust]", whether it could form the basis of some sort of truth serum? Inject some oxytocin into somebody who has something to hide, and introduce this person to an actor who pretends to be very trusting. I wonder if this would encourage the oxytocin-induced person to reveal secrets once sufficient trust is gained by the actor...
Re:It's all about greed (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not all stupid...
A friend of mine is a finance manager at a car dealership. Two women and a man came in about two months ago with a rather elaborate story. The first woman was married to the man, then fell in love with the second woman. The first woman wanted to buy a car, but had no credit history, although the social security number (and matching drivers license) she had provided was clean. Neither the other woman, or the husband, was willing to cosign. The woman also had all of the appropriate documentation for a credit less customer, addressed bills, paystubs, bank account balances, etc...
That night, the woman left my friend with a hefty down payment check, and the three left in a brand new, $30,000 car. The very next morning, the dealership was faxed the remainder of the information they needed to close out the deal. About two weeks later, when they were verifying the check and logging the deal, the bank let them know that the name on the check didn't match the name on the account. My friend did some digging, left the woman a message, and asked her to get back to him.
At this point, he called me, and told me the story. He hadn't put it together yet, but I couldn't stop laughing. The last thing he said to me, before I broke the news to him, was that the dealership probably wouldn't lose too much since they'd be able to repossess the car before they could put too many miles on it. I explained that they were long gone, and so was the car. It wasn't coming back, it was all a show, none of it was real. He checked out the cell phone, prepaid, checked out the paystub (manager said, "Another one! Have no idea who that is"), checked out the bills, fake account numbers. Everything was fake, the whole deal was a very elaborate hoax.
It's not hard to see why they succeeded. They came in with an elaborate story to distract and disarm. The more you're thinking about lesbians, the less you're thinking about proof. They were able to argue amongst themselves to great effect the entire time to further distract (e.g. "You left me for her, its not my problem, I had all you needed right here"). They also had all the answers and all the right explanations, there was no need to come back, they had all the information they required with them, and as they could see from the credit report, they knew what to bring because they'd already hit many other dealerships in the area.
The con artists also sweetened the deal for the dealership. My friend tried to reject the deal, but when the general manager found out that they were buying the car for sticker price with a maintenance plan, a very high profit deal, he told him to go ahead with it. They also took away the ability to verify the deal, and the incentive to verify the next day. They came in late in the day, when the banks were closed, and her job would have been closed, so they would have to take most of the information presented at face value. In addition, the additional information they requested was faxed over the next day to relieve suspicion.
The last thing they relied on was the most important, and that is the reluctance of those who have been scammed to report it. My dad uncovered a scam several years ago, where 21 people were taken for between $100k and $1M each over the course of a year, by a boat dealer. The dealer was never convicted, not because of the evidence, but because not a single person was willing to testify, publicly admitting their mistake. And before you think it couldn't happen to you, consider that even Al Capone was taken for $5,000 in the 1920s. Viktor Lustig approached Capone and offered to double his investment of $50,000 in 60 days. In 60 days, Lustig returned all $50,000 to Capone, and apologized that it didn't work, although he very much needed the money. Capone decided to give Lustig $5,000. What Capone didn't know, was that this is what Lustig had planned all along, he had never done anything but deposit the money in a bank account. In another case, Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower to
Famous cons (Score:1, Interesting)
Some very successful cons have happened right in the public eye recently.... ...one to the tune of 700 billion...
The difference between a mark and being kind? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see how your definition of being a mark to a con-man because of greed and just being kind to a liar is any different.
The action(s) performed are done in both cases are generally under your own free will.
The perceived harm is in the eye of the beholder (it's either charity or the sting of being conned).
If the only difference is in the "heart" of the mark before it happens, perhaps there is something objective. But that isn't something you can be always sure you know about you need to just trust sometimes. If the only difference is in your heart after it happens, then it is only subjective distinction.
Think for example, about a case where someone running an opensource project asks you to donate some time coding for a project and later parts of that project are fed into some closed source project. Basically, you are being charitable and the people running the project are cons.
However, if you never find out about the later action, and you made the donation of your effort being kind under your own free will, are you a mark? Or are you greedy for wanting your donation of time and effort to go to opensource only? Are you stupid for trusting the people running the project or are you stupid for thinking it's impossible for your donation to ever fall into a closed source project? Is it stupid to fully trust anyone? Are you really con-ned even though you aren't aware of the later action? Why would it change if found out much later?
Or maybe perhaps someone is playing on your sense of charity (and not greed) and your trust that they are what they appear to represent to con you (even if you didn't know it)?
That is why it's called a con (short for confidence). People running "cons" gain your con-fidence, then take advantage when you aren't expecting it. Greed isn't always required. But some level of trust is required for a con and we (as a species) appear to be trusting perhaps more than we should be in some circumstances.
You can call it being kind liars if it allows you to sleep at night, though ;^)
Con games - my personal experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone tried to con me over the chat (initially via OKStupid) a while back. It wasn't the usual brand of 419 scam (email full of hilarious malapropisms, bizarrely pompous status claims, heavily reliance on affiliation with God, et cetera).
It was personal.
The person put time into it. I'll use 'she' because she presented as a woman, a Dutch woman in her mid 50s. I can usually tell when a guy is trying to pass as a woman in chat as the conversation devolves to sex within about two minutes and thirty seconds; there's zero emotional content.
She was dying of cancer. She was straight. I'm not, but in any case, and in all truth, she wasn't the kind of person I'd choose as a partner. No matter, she seemed like a sweet and decent person. Not overly smart, not stupid. Good at connecting; she liked talking about emotions and the people in her life. So do I. She told me about her husband and how much she'd loved and missed him (he'd died not long before). We talked about all sorts of inconsequential trivia. She talked, off and on, for about three months. She told me about her faith. How sweet - I'm an atheist, but I honestly find the nicer Christians to be good and sincere company (not *you*, you dribbling neocon fuckwits). About half-way through the three months, she said she wanted to arrange a will, and that she had no-one left that she could trust to act as executor. She wanted *me* to play that role. I was surprised and flattered, and not so certain of my own moral compass (I was really down on cash and a student at the time) that I felt comfortable with the idea. I told her I was an atheist (I hadn't brought it up until then - I don't tend to preach). She said it didn't matter; she said that she trusted me. I told her I'd think about it.
She didn't press the issue, until about six weeks later. This time ostensibly from her hospital bed in London (she'd been mobile and functional up until that point).
She underlined her desperation. She talked about practical mechanisms by means of which I could accomplish my role. She made one mistake: she asked for my bank account details. I asked her why she couldn't open a new account on which I would have signing powers. After all, it would keep the finances clean and separate and allow for proof that I'd fulfilled my duties correctly, should need arise. She didn't give a satisfactory answer, and at *that* point, the penny dropped. I felt hurt and stupid. I voiced my feelings. I stopped talking to her.
There was still the nagging doubt that she might have been for-real, so I did nothing beyond this. I continued to feel guilty about the possibility that her story was true until time, and continual analysis of the event, satisfied me that she was full of shit.
Why, though, did she target *me*? I was a *poor* physics student at the time. And why did she spend so much time on it? We probably chatted a total of maybe 16-20 hours. In that time she could have made more money working at McDonalds than she'd have made out of *my* account...
Unless there are other identity-theft related uses for a genuine bank account belonging to a real human. With history.
Inadvertent reverse pigeon drop (Score:4, Interesting)
After finishing, I sat down at a bus shelter bench (with glass at my back) and my left hand on my briefcase. I hear a knock on the glasss behind me and to the right and turn my head just in time to see a hand pointing at a pile of bills on the sidewalk behind me.
I look around, and seeing nobody there, I turn around and bend down to reach for the cash, releasing my hold on my briefcase. After collecting the bills, I put my hand back on my briefcase and then I look at it... it had been switched.
Luckily, my briefcase contained only a pen and some pieces of ID. In exchange I got around 100 bucks and a new briefcase.
I admit I've been tempted to intentionally replicate this reverse pigeon drop.