Who Doesn’t Love a Good Con?

Rob Kelley here, thinking about scams and cons in fiction and real life. So I’ll start by saying a nonprofit I volunteer for was the target of a scam this last week. I’ll come back to that in a sec.

Con artists and cheaters, flim flammers and fakers, scammers and swindlers. No clearer sign of the popularity of trickery in our lives than the huge number of words to describe shams and skullduggery (OK, I’ll stop!). Our earliest stories include trickery: Odysseus, Loki, Raven, and, of course, the serpent in the garden. Something about lying is at the core of our relationships with language and with each other. And, also true, many of us lie for fun and profit–it is, after all, an alternate definition for fiction.

Maybe that’s why we love a good con. Who doesn’t come to admire Thomas Ripley even though he’s a pathological liar? We find ourselves actually rooting for him as the protagonist, worried he’ll get caught, relieved each time he gets to continue his murderous, stolen life as Dickie Greenleaf.

And we root for poor, sad sack Nick Dunne, with his disappointing life and inexplicably missing wife. But after we meet Amy halfway through the book, we are surprised and disrupted, unhappy with her deception, then a little more forgiving when we understand Nick’s casual betrayal, then supportive in her desire for revenge, then maybe somewhere in the middle in her final power play.

But the point is, we love cons because we love the ride.

Two weeks ago a small nonprofit I work with was contacted by a potential donor getting our mailing address details for a substantial donation. We provided that and asked where they had heard about our work, which they never answered. Instead, when the check was mailed–USPS with tracking–the donor asked for a deposit receipt. That was a new one for us, since most donors only ask for an acknowledgement. But it was a decent sized check, so we figured whatever made the donor comfortable.

Unfortunately our administrator was out on vacation that week, so it took a few days to get a staff member to the mail to pick up the check. The donor was very anxious, frustrated that we hadn’t deposited it.

My Spidey sense was tingling by this point. The organization the check was from had an unusual name, but we figured it might be a family business. The bank it was drawn on was real, an internet bank in the South. The check was for just shy of double the originally committed donation figure, but we figured they just committed more funds, so our bookkeeper deposited the check, and we sent along the deposit receipt and acknowledgement.

I joked with our bookkeeper that this felt like some kind of Nigerian Prince Scam. She wasn’t sure, and, frankly neither was I. Until, that is, the next email arrived.

Oh, goodness, our donor said, our secretary wrote the check for too much and we are traveling and need that money to pay a vendor. Can you please wire the excess funds back to us, or transfer it via PayPal?

Two seconds of searching revealed the con: The Overpayment Scam. (I confess I was disappointed this scam didn’t have a cool name like Spanish Prisoner, Pig in a Poke, Melon Drop, Badger Game, Pigeon Drop, Spear phishing, or my favorite: Pig Butchering. Again, so much language play!)

According to the Federal Trade Commission, a scammer will “‘accidentally’ send a check for too much, and ask you to refund the balance. But that’s a scam . . . These scams work because fake checks generally look just like real checks, even to bank employees. They are often printed with the names and addresses of legitimate financial institutions.” And “it can take weeks for a bank to figure out that the check is a fake.” In the meantime you’ve refunded the overpayment and you’re out that money when the scammer has moved on.

I made myself a pledge. I would not lie to this scammer, just keep them engaged as long as I could. I took such glee from this whole game that at one point I was actually rubbing my hands together like a bad Bond villain or Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.

We’d sent the deposit slip to the scammer last Wednesday, and by Friday the scammer was beside himself. He asked me to send it via Zelle or Venmo (we said we didn’t have that set up on our business account) and that our administrator was out through the end of the week (also true). By Friday we finally got the scammer to give wiring instructions, and by that point we had notified our nonprofit’s bank that the check was probably bogus, and the bank the check was fraudulently drawn on, and the bank the wire was supposed to go to, that they were part of a scam.

The scammer kept emailing asking if the wire was going out, and I said I was talking to the bank (I was, indeed, talking to the bank against which the fake check was written at that very moment). On Monday when no wire had shown up the scammer frantically begged us to wire the money immediately for same day execution, and I had to tell them that the check had not been accepted.

It was probably going a little too far to ask him for a replacement check for the original donation account, but I did it anyway.

I’m hardly the first person who has taken glee from messing with scammers, with Exhibit A being the scam revenge granny from the UK company Virgin Media/O2. This particular AI chatbot is targeted at computer support scams and is programmed to waste as much scammer time as possible.

Click on the image to watch a short video demo, dear.

No surprise, the revelation to our scammer that we were on to the fake check ended our correspondence. And while I had some fun, I am aware that this scammer, like thousands worldwide might, have very well have been part of a “scam farm,” the scope and scale of which have multiplied all over the globe, with trafficked people forced to run online and telephone scams in horrific conditions and against their will.

I guess for me it just brought home the truisms that underlie fiction, and especially crime fiction. We make up stories with violence and mayhem to show our characters, our people, righting wrongs, or at least exposing them. We don’t seek to cheat our readers, but we’re not unhappy to string them along, distract them with a red herring, then surprise them with a quick turn or a surprise reveal that brings justice, or knowledge, or closure.

I mean, who doesn’t love a good con?