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The truth of our absolute and total need for belief from our earliest moments of consciousness, from an infant’s unwavering knowledge that she will be fed and comforted to an adult’s need to see some sort of justness and fairness in the surrounding world. In some ways, confidence artists like Demara have it easy. We’ve done most of the work for them; we want to believe in what they’re telling us. Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.
Hard crime—outright theft or burglary, violence, threats—is not what the confidence artist is about. The confidence game—the con—is an exercise in soft skills. Trust, sympathy, persuasion. The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give.
seemingly bottomless capacity for credulity. Or, as one psychologist put it, “Gullibility may be deeply engrained in the human behavioral repertoire.”
For our minds are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them.
Give us a compelling story, and we open up. Skepticism gives way to belief.
The real confidence game feeds on the desire for magic, exploiting our endless taste for an existence that is more extraordinary and somehow more meaningful.
As long as the desire for magic, for a reality that is somehow greater than our everyday existence, remains, the confidence game will thrive.
Transition is the confidence game’s great ally, because transition breeds uncertainty. There’s nothing a con artist likes better than exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change.
Technology breeds crime. It always has, and always will.”
What are you confident in? The con artist will find those things where your belief is unshakeable and will build on that foundation to subtly change the world around you. But you will be so confident in the starting point that you won’t even notice what’s happened.
The confidence game starts with basic human psychology. From the artist’s perspective, it’s a question of identifying the victim (the put-up): who is he, what does he want, and how can I play on that desire to achieve what I want? It requires the creation of empathy and rapport (the play): an emotional foundation must be laid before any scheme is proposed, any game set in motion. Only then does it move to logic and persuasion (the rope): the scheme (the tale), the evidence and the way it
If it seems too good to be true, it is—unless it’s happening to me.
called high Machs—people high on the Machiavellianism scale, a measure first developed in 1970 by two psychologists who wanted to capture leaders’ manipulative tendencies, Richard Christie and Florence Geis—tend to be among the most successful manipulators in society.
In one early review, the Machiavellians among eleven distinct samples, including students, academic faculty, parents, children, athletes, the staff of a mental hospital, and business employees, were more likely to attempt to bluff, cheat, bargain, and ingratiate themselves with others. They were also more successful at doing so.
made for more convincing liars than the rest: when people were taped while denying that they had stolen something (half were being honest, and half lying),
It was only a few years after the Great Impostor went away—and after he’d sued Crichton and Random House for allegedly withholding funds—that that same Judy let him babysit their toddler daughter. Now that’s a true artist.
The dark triad pushes people in the direction of manipulation—Christie and Geis found that the highest Mach scorers among doctors had consistently chosen to be psychiatrists, a field where manipulation and mental control are central,
Today, Fallon believes that the genetics are there, true, but that certain critical periods in your childhood can nudge you more or less toward full-blown clinical psychopathy, so you exhibit some signs, for instance, but not the whole arsenal. Luck out, you become a high-functioning psychopath, like Fallon, and, perhaps, some of the con artists in this book. Get the bad draw, you become a violent psychopath, like the ones who fill up jails and sit on death row.
expressed—Fallon believes that the first three years of life play a crucial role in determining your psychopathic future.
child naturally develops so-called complex adaptive behaviors, like the ability to deal with fear, to smile, to react to those around her. But sometimes that process is interrupted, usually by something particularly stressful. A single traumatic event or a baseline of stress at home or in school could both,
For most people to go from legitimacy to con artistry, three things need to align: not just the motivation—that is, your underlying predisposition, created by elements like psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—but alongside it, opportunity and a plausible rationale.
Grifters are made when predisposition and opportunity meet.
Time and time again, Demara explained away his deceptions as good intentions gone astray. He wasn’t a grifter; he was someone caught up in bad circumstances, but who would always try to make good.
It starts with a small thing. A credit in a candy store. A fudged line in a financial statement. A rogue quote massaged ever so slightly to make your
And even though you thought it was just the once, because the circumstances were so extreme and you were in such a tight corner, those circumstances somehow never get any better. You’re always pressed for time, for money, for energy, for mental space. Always needing to do just a bit too much with a bit too little. And once you do it once, and successfully at that, the temptation to do it again, do it more, do it differently, grows. Rather than a cut corner, it becomes another tool in your arsenal.
“Just because I can,”
Over 40 percent were motivated by greed—but even more, just under half, by a sense of superiority, the hallmark of narcissism. They were simply better, they felt, and so they deserved more. Many reported being motivated by a sense of anger, of being underpaid and undervalued. Who are you not to appreciate me? I’ll show you.
The caterpillars simply pretended to be queen ants: they had learned the distinction between worker and queen sounds, and now their pupae and larvae had evolved to make queen-like noises.
“Lies are everywhere.” We lie in most any context—Feldman’s
“People like him seem to have the ability of the truth wizard, but they have no conscience. A superintelligent psychopath is my match.” She names a few more, among them serial killer Richard Kuklinski, better known as Iceman.
the deceitful papers used far more words related to the nature of the work itself—how and what you measure—and to the accuracy of the results.
The more adept a swimmer was at self-deception, the researchers found, the more likely she was to have made the cut. It wasn’t the people who saw the world most
clearly who did best; it was, rather, those most skilled at the art of seeing the world as they wanted it to be. And the world-as-we-want-it-to-be is precisely what the con artist sells. The
operators, like all good con men, are exceptional judges of character—and exceptional creators of drama, the sort of narrative sweep that can make everything seem legitimate, natural, even inevitable.
Victims tended to be more active in their online activities and gave out more personal information on social media—not just “No, duh” things like birth dates and phone numbers, but things like their daily activities, geo-tags and schedules, check-ins and tweets from specific restaurants or stores that made it easier to fake knowing them—or, in
window. Instead, one of the factors that emerges is circumstance: it’s not who you are, but where you happen to be at this particular moment in your life. If you’re feeling isolated or lonely, it turns out you’re particularly vulnerable. Likewise if you’re going through a job loss, divorce, serious injury, or other major life change, are experiencing a downturn in personal finances, or are concerned with being in debt. People in debt,
It makes a certain kind of sense. Often, patient, levelheaded people will go a bit crazy in the wake of a major life change—we become more impulsive, less stable, riskier versions of ourselves.
found that different types of people fell for different types of cons; depending on where you look, the profile of the ideal mark shifts considerably.
were more likely to be well-educated older men who made over $50,000 a year. Lottery frauds, on the other hand—fake tickets and the like—were likely to claim victims who were less educated and earned less money. When it came to prescription drug fraud and identity theft,
There’s an entire subset of cons, in fact, devoted to catching the master grifter at his own game, often perpetrated by others who feel he might have gotten too big for his boots. Con artists tend to be supremely confident—how can anyone beat me at my own game?—and
The brothers traveled to Turin, where they handed over the painting and brokerage fee in exchange for a down payment of 1.7 million Swiss francs. Thrilled with themselves, they went to deposit the haul. It was fake. The middleman and “sheikh” promptly disappeared, with painting and real euros in tow. The marks had become grifters only to once more find themselves marks.
