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The Neurological Basis of Con Games
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."
How we can we know this article is truthful? Can we really trust the author? He's a con man, after all.
I think most fairly successful people in business have to have a little con man in them to some degree.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you know you would be taken in by a profession con man ... I'll trust you to let me know ;)
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The trouble is, I have to get to a job interview. I have a client coming around right now with the cash. Can you do me a favour? I'll split the proceeds of the sale with you, but because I have to go, I'll grab my share now. That fine with you?
Cool.
---
I was trying to think of something serious to say, but honestly, I couldn't. I even read the first article and loaded up the video and second article. I guess I could make a random attack on capitalism as an economic system, but that would probably be unsubstantiated, so I won't.
I wank in the shower.
Doesn't everyone do this subconsciously, when they feel they would benefit from it? I know i have to stop myself sometimes, when i put myself in "vulnerable mode" to make people trust me more. I don't try to con people, i just do it because it... works? On the other hand, I'm into computer security. Maybe stuff like that is just part of the "security mindset" Bruce Schneier et. al. espouses? 2% sounds like a surprisingly small figure though.
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."
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
If cons work by making us feel good about helping the con man, then how come so many are based on the mark trying to rip off someone? In the pigeon drop, the mark is trying to rip off the con man. In insider-knowledge scams, the mark is trying to rip off honest traders or gamblers. With "white van" scams, the mark thinks he's buying stolen goods.
Forget all the babble about neurochemicals.
Forget all that scientific evidence...what, because you say so?
If you aren't greedy, if you aren't looking to get something for nothing, it will be nearly impossible for you to be conned.
So explain how a person is greedy without using the brain as a part of that explanation.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I don't easily trust strangers who inexplicably trust me. I'm not easily conned. I guess I have a doubting THOMAS.
Proverbs 21:19
Con men ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable...
Sounds like a few women I've dated. Sometimes, love and romance is also a con game, now isn't it?
No, those are just the obvious con men. The ones 'everyone' knows about because after it's over 'everyone' goes "How stupid would you have to have been to fall for that."
Believe me, there are plenty of other people out there who are willing to con you that don't rely on your greed.
Ever been the fall guy? The one left holding the bag?
Ever get suckered into buying a lemon car from used car salemen.
Ever been suckered into being 'friend' that gets the 'ugly one' on a double date?
Ever donate to a charity because the guy on the TV asked you too and said "Your dollars can help".
Greed is a tool to catch the greedy. Compasion is the tool used to catch the compasionate. Pride is the tool used to catch the prideful (as in "You are too smart to ever fall for such an obvious con...)
There are plenty of clay feet out there to aim at, greed is just one of them.
So about 6 million in America alone.
Say, isn't that about the population of Los Angeles and Manhattan (just the island, not the rest of NYC) combined? That would explain a lot.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
...it's because you're a gullible fool. When I get conned, it's because someone "took advantage of the human oxytocin-mediated attachment system". Well, who wouldn't fall for that?
That explains all the suspicious "please help me" posts on Craigslist.
One of these days I'm going to open CL and see this:
Dear Esteemed Sir;
I represent mYself, a poor Nigerian pe asant with FIVE MILLION CHILDREN to feed. I beg of you please do not send food or it will be STOLEN by corrupt officials. Instead please wire THE SUM OF 10 MILLIION US DOLLARS to [Western Union recipient information deleted for posting to Slashdot] so that I may buy food for my fAamily and pay off the police so they don't rape my daughters.
Thank You and God Bless.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Believe me, there are plenty of other people out there who are willing to con you that don't rely on your greed.
Care to point some of them out?
The Craigslist Bad Check scam, where the con sends a check for several thousand more than the asking price. They'll email you saying that their secretary made a mistake, but they trust you, so go ahead and cash it and send back the difference. It's a bad check, of course, but your bank won't notice for a few days, and then they'll hold you responsible for the difference, plus the check you just sent back.
The mark isn't working on greed. They don't expect to get anything more than the original asking price. The con works purely on feelings of trust.
Not a typewriter
When dealing with $3,000 a light has to go off in your head that says "there are procedures for dealing with this". Go to the police. Tell the guy you'll walk to the nearest police station with him, or that you'll call the non-emergency number with your cel phone. The police will hold the money for a statutory limit, and if nobody claims it, THEN you might get it. YMMV on the laws in your jurisdiction and how honest the cops are.
Now, if you're not a totally honest man a different light goes off in your head. That light says "How can I get this money, nevermind the victim or due process".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_JZL9pC6-8
I've heard somthing similar also happened in Bolivia. I think it's all about greed/dreams of easy money.
There is no doubt that functional imaging such as fMRI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri) PET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography) and MEG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoencephalography) have been a tremendous boon to the field of neuroscience. But seeing localized activity in the brain and then drawing a conclusion about the mechanisms of behavior is the wrong way to interpret the data. I hate Psychology Today for pulling this crap all the time, activity in the brain is simply data to be interpreted, not a conclusion in itself. This is like when a segment of DNA is implicated in some sort of behavior or developmental trait, and we see the headlines "X gene discovered!!!". The question is simply too complex to answer with that kind of analysis.
We cannot view the brain as a simple modular system, which merely needs a circuit diagram drawn to discover its mysteries. Functional specialization no doubt exists, but in an interconnected and complex way that resists simple explanations of "oh, this part of the brain lit up during this therefore this". Localization alone tells us little, it is only in complement with studies of neurotransmitter mechanisms, single cell recordings, computational theories, and numerous other techniques of brain exploration that any real answers are going to be found. THOMAS doesn't explain anything, its just a piece in the puzzle.
Germany during World War II, for example, most believed and followed Hitler. Germany had some smart people, but they made stupid decisions and fell for Hitler's scam.
The same is true of Democratic and Republican US citizens falling for their candidate's scams. Once elected into office, do you really think they will keep every promise they made and do what they told their supporters they would do?
If it sounds too good to be true, most of the time it isn't true at all, it is a scam.
If, for example, you get an email saying you won the UK lottery chances are it is a scam, or Bill Gates giving out millions if you forward this email to 20 of your friends and family, it is a scam, or someone dying in Nigeria with your last name and has $10 million waiting to be wired to you and need your contact info and banking numbers etc, it is a scam.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Remember how complex the task of navigating the world in any sort of functional manner is. As evidence look at how successful AI is in navigating across a room with furniture. For all its flaws, the mind has an amazing capacity to navigate it's environment and accomplish goals, even if you don't agree with said goals. Every brain is a marvel, even as screwed up as we are.
No, I meant condensation, he was drooling.
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...
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
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
I remember from the early parts of the book Influence: the Science and Practice (awesome book, by the way) that the author pointed out that we're wired to participate in society as efficiently as possible... well, by "we" I don't necessarily mean slashdotters.
Anyway, our brain takes shortcuts to make our interaction with those around us be mostly smooth and beneficial for everyone. These shortcuts can be taken advantage of by bad people to gain our compliance to things we shouldn't comply with. We get conned.
But the author makes a point that these shortcuts are generally a good thing and mostly necessary... we should just beware when something seems fishy.
That's why it bothers me when people use some poor sap that gets taken advantage of to prove that you need to be greedy or a jerk or self-centered to make it through life without being screwed. To hell with that, continue to be kind, self-less, helpful, and trusting... but also listen to those warning bells in the back of your mind that might appear from time to time.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
But I don't. --It doesn't stop me from endeavoring to be honest, but there are certain types of cons which honest people fall for, perhaps more easily than the corrupt.
Like this whole sham economy we have running around us. Ideas like, paying back the bank interest feels natural because an honest man doesn't want something for nothing. And yet it's arguably one of the biggest, most willfully destructive scams currently going.
Just a thought.
-FL
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 ;^)
Trust in paper documents seems to be lagging way behind the ability to forge them. How hard is it to scan/photoshop/print a utility bill these days?
I would say very hard.
Let me present to you, the HP PSC 2355, combined printer/scanner/hairdrier.
It won't scan unless I have toner in the printer. In addition, some errors present themselves, requiring you to press the ok button. Once you do this, it presents the same info again, requiring you to press the ok button...
The HP PSC 2355: "you just can't reason with it, and it simply will not stop until you are dead"
She made the willows dance
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.
It was around the end of the month and I was going from bank to bank (on the same street) in the financial district, making tranfers among various accounts I had. I was dressed in a business suit and was carrying a briefcase.
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.
Set your phasers on "funky"!