I wrote recently about how deception works best when a magician asks someone to look closely in one direction, while he performs his trickery in another direction, outside one’s gaze.
(See, The Closer You Look, The Less You See.” See, also, Techniques of Municipal Distraction Numbers 1-9, Numbers 10-18, and Numbers 19-22.)
A skillful confidence game isn’t merely about tricking someone. It’s about tricking someone in a particular – highly effective – way.
The most effective – and so worst – confidence game isn’t when a swindler persuades a mark to have confidence in the con artist.
The worst con is when the swindler persuades the mark that he, the swindler, has confidence in his victim, the mark.
There’s a line from House of Games in which a con man explains a deeper fraud:
“It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.”
Persuading someone to believe in a confidence man is only a penultimate fraud; persuading a victim to believe in his – the victim’s – own supposed need and ability to overcome that need himself (through the con man’s proposal) is the foundation of the ultimate swindle.
It all begins with “you really, really need to do this,” “I just know you can do it,” and “let me be the one to help you.”
Seeing what’s coming – for what it is – is the beginning of a defense against it.