A hip black guy wonders up to you on the streets of San Fransisco and says
“I bet you five bucks I can tell you were you got you shoes.”
You’re in a strange city, hundreds miles from home and you KNOW that he can’t possibly have any idea where you got your footwear.
So you take him up on the offer.
“You got them on your feet.”
Here is an old riddle for you from my previous blog.
Google is cheating.
Imagine you just purchased a Rolex off ebay. It is identical in every way to a Rolex watch. You test the metal content and the gold is real gold, the silver is real silver and the stainless steel is real steel. Unlike the fakes, it weighs exactly the same as a Rolex, down to the gram. The second hand ticks once a second, every second and is perfectly in time with the atomic clock. The watch comes with papers individually certified by the Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètresand. The box is sealed with an official Rolex seal.
Is the watch real?
The ‘Rats and Cats’ scam first appeared as an advertisement in The Lacon Local News - an illinois newspaper in 1875. The paper printed a small advertisment offering the following deal:-
We are starting with a cat in ranch in Lacon with 100,000 cats. Each cat will average 12 kittens per year. The cats skins will fetch 30 cents each. One hundred men can skin 5000 cats a day.
Now what shall we feed the cats?
We will start a rat ranch next door with 1000,000 rats. The rats breed 12 times faster than the cats. So we will have four rats to feed each day to each cat.
Now what shall we feed the rats?
We feed the rats the carcasses of the cats after they have been skinned. Now get this! We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats and get the skins for nothing!
You have to remember that this was over one hundred years ago when there were more uses for a cat pelt than just dressing Whitney Housten for court appearances.
Turns out I won’t always love you.
The story was picked up by the AP and run across the US for weeks attracting thousands of would be investors to The Lacon Local News.
However, the business never actually existed. Not because it was scam but because it was a hoax. Willis Powell, the editor of the Lacon, was sick and tired of the various get rich quick advertisements that he was forced to print that he decided to create his own joke version.
It was his way of commenting on the phenomenon without directly biting the hand that feeds him. Of course, it blew up in his face and he vowed to never print hoaxes again.
Rats!
My one man show - Scamapalooza - opens on 30 June at Northcote Town Hall.
For readers of my blog I have a special deal. You can pick up $10 for any show of the season just by using the promotional code “Hustle” when you book.
It’s going to be a great show!
In 1972, writer Clifford Irving sold a fake autobiography of reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes to publishers McGraw Hill. Despite lie detectors, phone calls from real Hughes and extensive tests by handwriting experts to see if the signature on the contract were really by Hughes, the publishers stood by Irving.
In his account of the hoax, Project Octavio, Irving tried to shift some of the blame onto McGraw-Hill
“A moment in time arrives…when the victim’s willingness may lead him, consciously or otherwise, across the thin dividing line between gullibility and culpability.”
It’s an excuse that con artists from the smallest street hustler to the largest Ponzi schemer uses to excuse their actions and assuage their guilt: - You can’t con an honest man.
It is true that scams, by their very nature, require a certain willingness from the victim. If the victim is not willing, the scam becomes petty theft. The mark must freely hand over the money.
Exploiting the weakness of the mark does not make the mark culpable. Certainly, the mark may be guilty of a crime but not the crime with which we accuse the con artist.
Imagine I tell you I want your help in a card cheating scam. However, the scam is a double bluff and you end up penniless.
Do you deserve to be scammed?
Does being the perpetrator of one crime, make it ok to make you the victim of another?
As a con artist, am I less culpable for my crime because you are particularly gullible or particularly dishonest?
You can’t the music playing at the very end because we were in the studio but...this song was playing.
I’m very excited about this new scam to hit Australia.
Firstly, it’s an excuse to use the meme ‘2.0′ to describe it.
Secondly, it’s devastatingly simple, risk free for the con artist and would have a high success rate.
Step One: The con artist advertises in the local paper for secret shoppers. Stay with me, it’s not your usual secret shopper swindle.
Step Two: The mark responds to the advertisment and is told they will be testing customer service at Western Union. They are given 2000 euro in fake traveller’s cheques.
Step Three: The mark cashes the cheques and sends 1650 euro to the con artists overseas. They keep 350 for themselves.
Step Four: To allay any suspicions, the mark is asked to fill in a survey on their customer service experience.
The con artist gets to pass off thousands of dollars of cheques around the world, the mark gets paid and Western Union absorb the loss.
Pictured: Sen Const Mick Carmody. Not Pictured: Appropriate facial hair.
I’m a big fan of graphic novels.
Not comics. Graphic novels.
Comics are for nerds. Graphic novels are for nerds who don’t want to admit they are nerds.
The world of comics - sorry, graphic novels - is an excellent source for forgers and con artists.
Recently, a forger spent many hours trying to create a forgery of Lee Joong-sup’s painting, white bull. The forger was caught Lee is one of Korea’s most celebrated modernist painters.
One of these pictures is bull. Geddit?
A lot of hard work down the drain.
Now consider Mike Turner. Turner, who died in 2008 of bone cancer, is a legend in the comic community. He drew for Batman, Superman, The Flash and Soulblade. Not that I’m into that sort of stuff.
According to Bleeding Cool, ebay is full of fake Turner sketches. The listing shows a real sketch but the winning bidder gets a fake.
The comic community does not have the same resources to find forgers as the wider art community.
Not only that, it is far easier for a forger to fake a simple sketch then a complex oil painting.
Furthermore, many people outside of comics don’t even think of comics as ‘real art’.
I guess what I’m saying is…can someone forge this for me?
This email has come to me on several occasions.
But is it real?
————–
From the Colorado Bureau of Investigation:
“Southern California law enforcement professionals assigned to detect new threats to personal security issues, recently discovered what type of information is embedded in the credit card type hotel room keys used throughout the industry.
Although room keys differ from hotel to hotel, a key obtained from the “Double Tree” chain that was being used for a regional Identity Theft Presentation was found to contain the following the information:
a.. Customers (your) name
b.. Customers partial home address
c.. Hotel room number
d.. Check in date and check out date
e.. Customer’s (your) credit card number and expiration date!
When you turn them in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a hand full of cards home and using a scanning device, access the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense.Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these cards until an employee re-issues the card to the next hotel guest. At that time, the new guest’s information is electronically “overwritten” on the card and the previous guest’s information is erased in the overwriting process. But until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it usually is kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!!!!
Information courtesy of: Sergeant K. Jorge,
Detective Sergeant————–
Short answer?
No, it’s a hoax. The story comes from a quote from 2003 by Sergent Jorge who said:
“In years past, existing software would prompt the user (employee) for information input. If the employee was unaware of hotel policy dictating that such information NOT be entered, it could have ended up on the card in error.”
However, the types of cards that hotels use just don’t have the storage capability to store your credit card number, address or name. They have a single track that includes nothing but a code linked to the room number. That code is wiped automatically when you check out.