How grifters and con artists trick people into handing over billions each year, sometimes again and again.
Good grifters or con artists are excellent intuitive psychologists.
Just like magicians, these swindlers and dishonest gamblers understand enough about how the mind works to exploit its vulnerabilities.
Our fascination with grifters is insatiable and, despite being criminals, they are frequently portrayed by Hollywood in a flattering light, in films like The Sting, Catch Me If You Can and the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy.
Of course the reality is nowhere near as romantic, especially if you’ve fallen for one of the cons.
Frank Stajano, a security expert at Cambridge University, has been working with Paul Wilson, a scam artist and author of BBC TV’s The Real Hustle to identify the 7 major psychological principles used in short cons to part people from their cash (Stajano & Wilson, 2009; PDF, 308K).
1. Grifters use distraction
Attention is like spotlight, which means when it’s pointing in one direction it pretty much ignores everything else.
Except people don’t realise how little information coming in from the outside world we actually process.
Naturally you don’t notice what you don’t notice, plus the mind is designed to fill in the gaps for us.
But con artists do know and almost every con uses some kind of distraction.
The classic example is ‘Three-card Monte‘ sometimes called ‘Find the Lady’, a rigged card game in which the aim is to find one card out of three after…
