Why we fall for cons | Hacker News Reader

Why we fall for cons

timharford.com

102 pointshhs49 comments

A far, far deadlier variation of the Köpenick caper: In Norway, 2011, Anders Breivik got himself ferried to the Utøya island solely on the strength of convincing demeanor and a homemade pastiche of a police uniform.

There was a real policeman in charge of security on the island. After the bombing of government headquarters in Oslo an hour earlier, everything was on top terror alert, and Utøya had beeen put in quarantine, the connecting little ferry ordered not to sail.

Despite all this, Breivik was instantly ferried across, no questions asked, heavily armed and politely assisted with the carrying of ammunition boxes both onto and off the the boat.

Upon landing, he almost immediatly shot and killed the police officer, who despite apparent doubts had not taken up any countermeasures. And then of course killed 68 more, plus wounded about twice that number.

With a phone call and a modicum of due diligence, everyone would have been safe.

> With a phone call and a modicum of due diligence, everyone would have been safe.

Isn't it substantially more likely the officer would've been shot, and the ferry driver forced to take the trip at gunpoint anyways?

The ferry was at quai on the island. It was actually sent across to the mainland on Breivik's request. Anyway, even if hijacked at gunpoint, consider that 600 people would have had 5 to 10 minutes warning that a lone gunman was approaching on a small vessel with only one possible point of entry.

"It is exciting to read about a fraud — from a distance. It is not so funny to live through one."

This is a great summary.

My estranged father is a professional con artist: He has multiple lies on his social media about his alleged wealth and committed credit card fraud while I was in high school resulting in my parents' formally declaring bankruptcy.

I have found it very difficult in life to convey in words what being exposed up close and personal to con men is really like, because normal people lack imagination to put themselves in the mind of someone who doesn't care at all about humanity.

Author Chuck Klosterman has a chapter about con artists in his book "I Wear the Black Hat" which covers similar ground as Harford: people enjoy these stories and con men because of a mix of admiration (life is easier in some ways if you literally biologically can't care about anything except base biological needs of sex, power, and consumption) and curiosity for the different.

Having known multiple con men in my life, including family, I can definitely claim it's less entertaining in person than in media.

The other book I recommend on this topic is Dr. Kent Kiehl's "The Psychopath Whisperer" for its mix of neuroscience and personal stories.

"I Wear the Black Hat - Grappling with Villains Real and Imagined": https://www.amazon.com/Wear-Black-Hat-Grappling-Villains/dp/...

"The Psychopath Whisperer": https://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Without-...

Sounds terrible what you've experienced with your family members. Do you trust your father in any capacity at all?

Not at all, haven’t seen him in about two years (by his choosing) and mom just divorced him a year ago.

Mostly I’m worried he’ll end up conning more money out of others now that he’s unconstrained by family. I’ve seen people are generally too trusting because:

1) good people don’t think about lying in the same way/frequency as con men,

2) as another commenter noted, the cost for due diligence is too high,

3) there is a fine line between “con” and “fake it till you make it” or “a good salesperson” and people will give benefit of the doubt that someone is the latter two.

Thank you for the reply.

I've come up with something that I keep in mind both for cons and politics: "there's no defense against someone lying to you about something you don't know." This isn't to stop people from listening to others, but to limit one's personal (emotional and/or intellectual and/or financial) investment in what someone, often a stranger, says.

You don't have to decide whether you believe what someone is saying on the spot, but someone with ulterior motives will try to convince you to do so. This is how I think of hustles: trying to get someone to do something before they'd normally be ready to, to commit to meaning in some way, but quickly. The literal sense of "hustle" is always in operation here.

And I'm sure I've been conned in ways I don't even realize and never will, but I've also known when I've been conned, but the above are my survival techniques I've deduced as a result.

> fake it til you make it

I had a conversation with a friend recently about a mutual acquaintance. She surprised me by calling him a con man. In all the years I knew this man, I’d never thought of him as a con man, but the title could fit based on the people who he’d ultimately screwed over. I pushed back with my friend’s characterization slightly because con man seemed a bit more malicious than what I percieved as his intent. Mostly I wasn’t sure if he’d crossed a similar line as ‘fake it til you make it’ in that in business, you often have to convince enough people that something will happen otherwise it won’t and at some point you may he overcommitted and have no choice but to embellish the truth and hope that some major piece doesn’t pull out and ruin the entire chain of dependencies. A prime example is missing payrole. It is basically death for a company, but saying you might miss payroll could guarantee you’ll miss payroll... so lie and hope for the best... Maybe not a great example, and he might be a conman for similar types of lies told to vendors. I do think it’s interesting that much of business relies on convincing people you can do what you say though...

The main difference is the level of knowledge and intent on coming through with your promises.

It’s one thing to pitch people saying “If I/we do X and Y, we’ll make money.” It’s another if you make that pitch knowing you can’t possibly do it or that you know ahead of time you also need Z and don’t disclose that to your colleagues. Or maybe X and Y are possible but you have no intent to do it and just pocket the money and fly away.

If you later find out something unexpected, ethically you should disclose that to partners before taking more of their time or money.

Using your information asymmetry to take other’s money is unethical.

Also, often the best con men won’t seem to have malicious intent because they don’t; they have purely selfish motives. Whether other people benefit or are harmed is irrelevant to their selfish benefit.

I’ve seen this play out where yes-men/people just follow a psychopathic leader around because he rewards them for being members of his cult (as a means to keep them as followers, not because he cares about them). I would bet there were some very well paid people near the top of WeWork who knew it was a farce but were too well paid to sacrifice themselves and expose the truth early.

You may well know this but John le Carre's father was a big time con man. The somewhat autobiographical novel "A Perfect Spy" goes into his experiences and is an excellent read.

I did not and will pick it up, thank you for the recommendation!

Another explanation would be "assumed due diligence".

It's the assumption that someone else has already confirmed the veracity of the situation. Once the "officer" had the first group of dupes in tow, he appeared legitimate to the second and third groups of people he encountered.

Using this approach, you parley the deception of each subsequent group of people into one spectacular overall ruse.

Yup. The amount of times I've heard "The telephone companies wouldn't let anyone just pretend to be 911, would they?" is stunning. By the time people are speaking to the scammer, they've already been fooled once.

I've traveled a fair amount in the third world and I think it has given me insight into why people in places like America are more likely to fall for cons and it's because 1st world countries are considered high trust societies (good topic to read about if you're interested) and generally people here deal with people who are honest on average and aren't always on guard against being cheated. In many third world countries these places are considered low trust societies and it's necessary to be constantly on guard. For example when traveling in these places I have to be very careful checking change I get back as I've been cheated a few times, things like this. This builds up a natural distrust of others that I think may help guard against being a victim.

Being constantly on guard can be seen as a transaction cost, and when you add that to every single interaction in the whole society you put a real damper on the GDP

> 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

What I always find interesting is how Milgram’s experiments are put into context (“explained away” might be more apt) by various authors. Anecdotally, no one seems to be open to accept the conclusions of the experiments, just like in the article. When this topic was brought up at some point in school, I remember my teacher prefacing it with the experiments not having been replicated elsewhere (which they actually have been).

I cannot comment on the specific point raised here, it’s been a while since I read Milgram’s book, but I remember that many different experimental conditions have been tested, and I don’t think that picking out a single one of them and reinterpreting some minute aspect changes the overall significance.

Moreover, if you’re in the sorry situation of being on the receiving end of some punishment ordered by an authority figure, like the “learner” in the experiment, does it really matter that whoever doles out the punishment, does so not because of an explicit order but because he is being coaxed in various ways to obey?

One key point of the experiments is that the overseer has no formal authority over the teacher at all, and the fact that a lab coat and some easy psychological conditioning steps are sufficient to make over half of the population obey should give anyone food for thought.

Skipping a few steps of thought here, but my conclusion is that we are all being groomed to obey authority figures – the “con” aspect is not decoupled from that; it is one of many mechanisms that are used to exert control. What Milgram showed is a practical consequence of that process.

Not closely related to the article at all, but the title reminded me of another reason we might fall for cons, which is that we haven't read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks

And the Little Black Book of Scams.

https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/0...

Interesting article.

>Refusing to administer a shock of 225 volts would be an implicit admission that they had been wrong to deliver 210.

This aligns with my suspicion around why we fall for cons, whether it's similar to the Köpenick caper, the above experiments or even some to the "Prince of Nigeria" type cons - it's the cost of being wrong. In the story with Captain Voigt, the cost of being wrong started off quite high and rose with every order acquiesced to. In the experiments, it started off low but rose with every iteration. With a "large windfall" type con, the cost of being wrong is, at least naively, missing out on an entirely new life.

Combine that with a figure of presumed valid authority - a scientist at a research institute, an army Captain, or a Prince with access to means - and it's not difficult to see how people become entrapped.

I’ve often wondered given what we now know about psychopathy (it’s heritable, has a biological basis) if humanity, and especially it’s social order, isn’t locked in a kind of evolutionary arms race between these two forms.

Essentially, psychopaths push for forms of social ordering that allow them the greatest latitude, entrench hierarchical power, and normalize their antisocial nature, while the prosocial rest of us struggle to resist them through more communal and consensus-oriented forms.

There’s obviously a continuum between the two poles from which all conflict and failures arise, but given how much of success in modern society seems oriented around the antisocial pole, I’m often left wondering which side is winning.

Yep - and keep in mind winning in the evolutionary game is (local) offspring, not the state of the world at large. A true psychopath would gladly trigger WW3 to gain some local optimum.

The late, great Pieter Hintjens touches on this point in his book "The Psychopath Code" [1].

Psychopathy seems to exist along a spectrum -- it's present in all of us to varying degrees, and may not become "activated" for most people, in most situations.

There is a good argument that this cat-and-mouse game has been going on for as long as "freeloading" has been going on, which is to say it is probably older than humanity.

[1] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details

"psychopaths push for forms of social ordering that allow them the greatest latitude,"

This is an interesting idea, but I fully disagree that it's reality.

We can debate about 'how much', but some aspects of social order require hierarchy and power - it's unavoidable.

The 'psychopaths' are the one's who wield it without regard for the inherent responsibility.

'Concentrations of power' are not inherently bad, but they provide a much more potent opportunity for corruption.

There’s a wonderful interactive online game (for lack of a better work) that lets you explore and experience a game theoretic analysis of that tension. Very instructive. When trust collapses, everyone is much worse off.

https://ncase.me/trust/

...is because humans, in general, have a natural truth bias.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-default_theory#Truth_bia...

For those who are interested in countermeasures for cons and scams from a machine learning and information security perspective, take a look at 419eater. They are a forum of volunteers who spend their time increasing the opportunity cost for advanced fee fraud scammers.

https://forum.419eater.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=66

They also use the infamous Lenny natural language bot among other methods of automation.

I honestly expected an article about the pitfalls of many Lisps' use of cons chains to produce lists; versus fixed length arrays and resizeable vectors.

There's a con game you can witness being played in San Francisco on many warm afternoons, usually between Pier 33 and Pier 39, a location designed to catch the tourists coming off the Alcatraz tour boats at Pier 33. It's called the shell game.[1]

The aim of the "game" is to bet money on which shell the ball is under after the shells are mixed up. It's played in many other parts of the world, and though in the old days was played with walnut shells, these days they usually use plastic bottle caps, match boxes, or metal cups. Instead of the traditional ball, these days they usually use a piece of chewing gum or wad of aluminum foil. Here's a video of a famous shell game hustler plying his trade: [2], and another of the shell game being played in Stockholm: [3] Many more here: [4]. The three card monte[5] is essentially the same scam, with three face down cards instead of shells.

The sad thing is that many people think this is a game of skill. But it's not. It's a con that's been refined over hundreds of years to non-violently rob you of your money.

Something else most people don't realize is that when there's a shell game going on, the shell game operator (the guy who mixes up the shells) is not alone. He's almost always part of a gang of between 4 to 8 people, each playing a specific role in the scam. Some of the most important pretend to be players, making noise, having a great time, and apparently winning lots of money, since the hardest thing to do in a shell game con is to get people to stop and play, and this is the main way they do it. They also have lookouts, who warn the gang if they spot the police, and others with various functions like smoothing over ruffled feathers of the losers or handling trouble. In the above videos you'll also see gang members regularly stand in front of cameras to try to block the view.

Unless the shell game operator is incompetent or wants to give the impression that the game is being played fairly (usually when no actual money is at stake), the mark will never be able to guess where the ball is, as the operator has a cheating move to make the ball disappear from under any shell and appear anywhere else he wants.. and if the mark ever does guess correctly, there are numerous ways the hustlers have of making sure the mark never collects his money. One common way is for one of the gang members to yell "police" and have everyone run away (usually with the mark's money). Another is for one of the gang members to "accidentally" knock the table over before the shell is lifted. If all else fails for them, they will often not be above just simply mugging their mark a couple of blocks away from the game.

Really, the only way to "win" at this "game" is to have a bigger gang.

Unfortunately, the police don't seem to do anything about this, even though they're usually well aware that the games are being played. I've been told by SF police that they know the shell game is going on there, but there's nothing they can do because as soon as they approach the hustlers run away. All they can do is cite them for littering, because they usually knock their cardboard table over on the sidewalk before they run away. I'm not sure why the police haven't just dressed as tourists, though. It should be pretty easy to catch the hustlers then.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRFlJVTT8FY

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AboNGr7RxKE

[4] - http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=61150A4524304AB8

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_card_monte

Three card monte demonstrated by Ricky Jay.

https://youtu.be/7jKuHiY397U?t=190

Cups and balls:

https://youtu.be/QwF1ec4Ji7Y

Penn and Teller doing cups and balls with clear cups and it’s no less amazing:

https://youtu.be/8osRaFTtgHo

I'm surprised enough people fall for it that it's worth 3+ people's time to do it.

At least in London and other UK cities, the bigger “con” is the pickpockets that are ready to take the valuables of people standing still with their attention on the game.

The bit about voting for taller people seems misplaced. There seems to be a strong suggestion of causality, but all there's evidence for is statistical connection.

> There’s not much doubt that some voters were influenced by the disparity in height... But serious statistical analysis concludes that taller presidential candidates are more likely to win the election, more likely to win re-election, and more likely — unlike Donald Trump — to win the popular vote.

Seems like a stretch. One of those things where predictive analytics would dump out "height diff" as a useful factor in naively predicting who the winner will be, but the real cause is something deeper.

This phenomenon has been observed in many other cases, such as CEOs of large corporations.

IIRC 30%+ of F500 CEOs are 6'2" or taller

I wonder how that number looks if you compared founder CEOs with replacements.

Due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

Because in some way, we wish some things to be true. A little phantasy.

Was expecting "Aw, shucks, I can't stay mad at you" love letter to the humble Common Lisp operator. Was confused to find story illustrating psychological phenomena at work.

You're not the only one!

I see what you did there. Is it related to Americans' love affair with the car? snort snort

My other car is a cdr.

That's not a real car.

If you want a second car, get a cadr.

If you want a (second (car)) get a cadar.

Same; what I’d really like to see though is a love letter to symbols. Might have to write it myself, I guess.

I'm laughing at the thought of racket schemers as cons artists

To be fair, some varieties of racket schemes are cons.

Why would you ever be mad at the cons function, by the way.

#DropOutBloomberg is another case study for this. People are not very good at untangling noise from the actual signal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com