I just received this email from Loretta at ABC Statewide Drive
Someone rang up talk back a couple of days ago and said his elderly mother was sucked in to the water cooler scam.. He said he was able to change her bank accounts etc and she only lost around $100, because he’d heard you talking about the scam on the show. He said to thank-you!
The water cooler/filter scam is very popular at the moment.
Good News: You receive a phone call from a telemarketer telling you that you have won a water cooler.
Bad News: You have to pay for the filters for the filters that go in it.
Good News: The filters are very cheap.
Bad News: While charging your credit card for the filters they also charge you over $100 for the postage.
Bad News: They don’t tell you about this.
Bad News: They keep sending you filters each month and keep charging your credit card.
Bad News: Because you agreed to the initial charges it’s very hard to get the money back
Bad News: Your name gets added to a list of people who might fall for the scam.
He doesn’t and the reporter implies the game is fixed.
What you have here is a classic ‘alibi store’ - a game of skill that is almost impossible. The flatty can demonstrate the game is possible but the mark has little chance of winning.
So how to beat the shooting gallery?
In this game, the mark has to shoot out a star in a piece of paper. If there is even the smallest piece of star remaining, the mark doesn’t win a prize.
The key to winning is to shoot around the star and not through the middle.
It’s pretty unfair to accuse the carnival workers of being cheating and putting them next to crooked con artists.
I’ve had three separate emails from readers asking questions about the film Inception.
Without spoiling too much of the plot for the four people who have not seen it, Inception swaps back and forth between reality and the dreamworld, leaving the viewer and the characters unsure as to whether they are trapped in the real world or a dream of someone else’s construction.
One of characters, Arthur - played by Joseph Gordon Lovett, carries a loaded casino dice as his totem.
Since only he knows the unique weight and feel of the dice, he simply needs to handle the dice to know whether he is in a world of someone else’s creation.
The question I’ve been asked repeatedly is, can you load a casino dice?
For many people, the answer to this questions has serious philosophical and extensional ramifications for the nature of the film.
These people also have serious opinions on Stargate and Rubik’s Cubes.
Worst. Blog. Ever.
According to Scarne on Dice, the bible for all things bones, a loaded dice is any dice with a weight in it.
Since casino dice tend to be constructed from a clear celluloid, one would assume it would be impossible to load a professional, Vegas style dice.
It’s an idea that has continue to this day, with many people, even casino professionals, assuming it is impossible to mess with a clear dice.
However, this fallacy is based on the assumption that casino dice are completely clear.
Few people notice that the spots on a dice are made by counter sinking small holes in the dice and then filling them with the solid white.
Within months of the introduction of the new, supposedly foolproof dice, a clever scam artist figured out he need simply drill out the spots on one side of the dice and fill them with thin, yet heavy, metal plates.
The metal is then painted and the dice looks 100% real yet will weighted so that the opposite side of the slugs wins.
Obviously, different metals can be used, but popular choices include gold, aluminum and platinum. To give you an idea of the work involved, a set of two dice will set you back around $200.
If the dice maker wishes the dice to roll the chosen number more often, he simply drills a deeper whole and puts in more metal. He may also drill deeper holes on the other sides and fill them with matching paint.
If you use a magnetic metal, you can also juice your dice. These dice would feel and roll normally until a strong magnet is placed under the table.
Clear dice can also be bevelled, rounding the corners or edges to make one side roll more often.
Or they might be shaved, with one side sanded down and respotted.
An expert could tell the difference between them, but only just.
I could on and we could talk about baking dice, suctions, raised edges and slick dice but who knows how far down the Inception rabbit hole that might send you….
Hi Nicholas, I listen to you each week on the abc and really enjoy the segment. We recieved a letter today containing a 5 cent piece. It is from a man called David Rhodes of Perth Western Australia. The letter is about a 3 step plan to get rich!
Your first step is to send $10.00 to a person listed 1st on a mailing list containing 5 names and addresses.
You then add your name to the mailing address and send out 200 letters with a five cent piece on it. Cutting a loong story short you send out all the letters and in 60 days you get $70000.00!. Would love to hear if you have heard of this practice.
We can send you the letter if you like and lastly is it a scam as i suspect?
Simon Humphrey
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Hi Simon-
The David Rhodes chain letter has been doing the rounds for many years.
It is a scam. Chain letters are considered pyrimid schemes in Australia. It is illegal to even take part in one.
The math just does work out.
If you send it to 200 people who send it to 200 and so on, by the time your name reaches the top it will be sent to more people than the population of the world. That’s 320,000,000,000 people supposedly sending you cash.
I’ve never heard of anyone making money from it.
All best
Nicholas
PS - That’s actually not true. The ONLY chain letter I’ve ever heard to be successful is the Underpants Letter. You send a pair of underpants to the person at the top of the list and, in two months, you receive underpants in the mail! Everyone I know who has taken part has received at least two pair of underpants.
