Portal:Confidence tricks
Portal maintenance status: (October 2018)
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Introduction
A confidence trick (synonyms include con, confidence game, confidence scheme, ripoff, scam and stratagem) is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence, used in the classical sense of trust. Confidence tricks exploit characteristics of the human psyche, such as credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers Lindsey Huang and Barak Orbach defined the scheme as “a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct, . . . intending to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial,” as they “benefit con operators (‘con men’) at the expense of their victims (the ‘marks’).”
Selected general articles
- In business, the term boiler room refers to an outbound call center selling questionable investments by telephone. It typically refers to a room where salesmen work using unfair, dishonest sales tactics, sometimes selling penny stocks, private placements or committing outright stock fraud. The term carries a negative connotation, and is often used to imply high-pressure sales tactics and, sometimes, poor working conditions. Read more...
- In the context of information security, and especially network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which a person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data, to gain an illegitimate advantage. Read more...
- SIM Swap fraud (also known as Port-Out scam or SIM splitting) is a type of account takeover fraud that generally targets a weakness in two-factor authentication & two-step verification, where the second factor or step is an SMS or a call placed to a mobile telephone. Read more...
- CyberThrill is one of the first and now-defunct online casinos, which gained it notoriety for one of the largest organised international sponsorship (and gambling) frauds, through its ad serving program. Formed in 1997 and located in Nassau, Bahamas, the company was represented by the Canadian firm Internet Entertainment Enterprises, Inc. (based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) which also handled the casino's marketing and banner advertising program. The online casino was eventually taken offline some time in late 2000-early 2001 by disgruntled webmasters who had fallen victim to the scam. The former location of cyberThrill was CyberThrill.com, which is today an Ad driven parked domain. Read more...
- Scams in intellectual property or invention scams are a type of scam in which either inventors are lured to pay money for development of their idea but the development does not occur, or investors pay money for a non existing product or for an invention never to be developed.
Intellectual property (IP) is a very complex area and covers a vast range of diverse subjects. As a result, there are opportunities for unscrupulous individuals and organizations to take advantage of those wishing to secure protection for their IP. Read more... - This is a listing of enterprises, gangs, and syndicates that are involved in organized crime. Tongs and outlaw motorcycle gangs, as well as terrorist, militant, and paramilitary groups are mentioned if they are involved in criminal activity for funding. However, since their stated aim and genesis is often ideological rather than commercial, they are distinct from mafia-type groups. Read more...
- Gender and age demographics of victims of online romance scams in 2011.
A romance scam is a confidence trick involving feigning romantic intentions towards a victim, gaining their affection, and then using that goodwill to commit fraud. Fraudulent acts may involve access to the victim's money, bank accounts, credit cards, passports, e-mail accounts, or national identification numbers; or forcing the victims to commit financial fraud on their behalf. In many instances, a mail-order bride scam will also bait the victim into committing felonies to establish citizenship for the perpetrator. Read more...
Carding is a term describing the trafficking of credit card, bank account and other personal information online as well as related fraud services. Activities also encompass procurement of details, and money laundering techniques. Modern carding sites have been described as full-service commercial entities. Read more...- The badger game is an extortion scheme, often perpetrated on married men, in which the victim or "mark" is tricked into a compromising position to make him vulnerable to blackmail. Read more...
- A spoofed URL describes one website that poses as another website. It sometimes applies a mechanism that exploits bugs in web browser technology, allowing a malicious computer attack. Such attacks are most effective against computers that lack recent security patches. Others are designed for the purpose of a parody.
During such an attack, a computer user innocently visits a web site and sees a familiar URL in the address bar such as http://www.wikipedia.org but is, in reality, sending information to an entirely different location that would typically be monitored by an information thief. When sensitive information is requested by a fraudulent website, it is called phishing. Read more... - Caritas was a Ponzi scheme in Romania that was active between April 1992 and August 1994. It attracted millions of depositors from all over the country, who invested more than a trillion old lei (between US$1 billion and $5 billion) before it finally went bankrupt on 14 August 1994, having a debt of US$450 million ($743 million in current terms). Read more...
- The green goods scam, also known as the "green goods game", was a fraud scheme popular in the 19th-century United States in which people were duped into paying for worthless counterfeit money. It is a variation on the pig-in-a-poke scam using money instead of other goods like a pig.
In the typical green goods scam, the mark, or victim, would respond to flyers circulated throughout the country by the scammers ("green goods men") which claimed to offer "genuine" counterfeit currency for sale. This currency was sometimes alleged to have been printed with stolen engraving plates. Victims, usually living outside major cities, would be enticed to travel to the location of the green goods men to complete the transaction. Victims were guided by a "steerer" to be shown large amounts of genuine currency – represented to be counterfeit – which was then placed in a bag or satchel. Victims then received offers to purchase the money at a price much less than face value. While a victim negotiated a price or was otherwise distracted, another accomplice (the "ringer") would switch the bag of money for a bag containing sawdust, green paper, or other worthless items. Victims would leave unaware of the switch, and were unwilling to report the crime, as attempting to purchase counterfeit currency was itself a crime and the victim accordingly risked arrest. Read more... - Clickjacking (User Interface redress attack, UI redress attack, UI redressing) is a malicious technique of tricking a Web user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives they are clicking on, thus potentially revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. It is a browser security issue that is a vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms. A clickjack takes the form of embedded code or a script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function. The term "clickjacking" was coined by Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen in 2008. Clickjacking is an instance of the confused deputy problem, a term used to describe when a computer is innocently fooled into misusing its authority. Read more...
- The Stanford Financial Group was a privately held international group of financial services companies controlled by Allen Stanford, until it was seized by United States (U.S.) authorities in early 2009.
Headquartered in the Galleria Tower II in Uptown Houston, Texas, it had 50 offices in several countries, mainly in the Americas, included the Stanford International Bank, and said it managed US$8.5 billion of assets for more than 30,000 clients in 136 countries on six continents. On February 17, 2009, U.S. Federal agents placed the company into receivership due to charges of fraud. Ten days later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission amended its complaint to accuse Stanford of turning the company into a "massive Ponzi scheme". Read more...
МММ was a Russian company that perpetrated one of the world's largest Ponzi schemes of all time, in the 1990s. By different estimates from 5 to 10 million people lost their savings. According to contemporary Western press reports, most investors were aware of the fraudulent nature of the scheme, but still hoped to profit from it by withdrawing money before it collapsed.
In 2011, MMM re-opened as "MMM Global". Read more...- Hustling is the deceptive act of disguising one's skill in a sport or game with the intent of luring someone of probably lesser skill into gambling (or gambling for higher than current stakes) with the hustler, as a form of both a confidence trick and match fixing. It is most commonly associated with, and originated in pocket billiards (pool), but also can be performed with regard to other sports and gambling activities. Hustlers may also engage in "sharking"—distracting, disheartening, enraging, or even threatening their opponents—to throw them off. Hustlers are thus often called "pool sharks". Professional and semi-pro hustlers sometimes work with a "stakehorse"—a person who provides the money for the hustler to bet with (and who may assist in the hustling)—in exchange for a substantial portion of all winnings. Another form of hustling (often engaged in by the same hustlers who use the skill-disguising technique) is challenging "marks" (swindle targets) to bet on trick shots that seem nearly impossible but at which the hustler is exceptionally skilled. Read more...
- Ezubao (Chinese: e租宝) was a peer-to-peer lending scheme based in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui. It was set up as an online scheme in July 2014, attracted funds of about 50 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) from 900,000 investors, and ceased to trade in December 2015. On 1 February 2016, the scheme was closed down and 21 involved people were arrested. Zhang Min, the president of the parent company, Yucheng Global, told investigators that the company operated as a Ponzi scheme. Read more...
A common fake pop-up tricking victims into thinking their computer has been infected with malicious viruses
A technical support scam refers to a class of telephone fraud activities, in which a scammer claims to offer a legitimate technical support service, often via cold calls to unsuspecting users. Such cold calls are mostly targeted at Microsoft Windows users, with the caller often claiming to represent a Microsoft technical support department.
In English-speaking countries such as the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, such cold call scams have occurred as early as 2008 and primarily originate from call centers in India. Read more...- The bogus escrow scam is a straightforward confidence trick in which a scammer operates a bogus escrow service.
Escrow services are intended to ensure security by acting as a middleman in transactions where the two parties do not trust each other. Rather than sending money or goods directly to the other party (which is insecure, as one or the other party must send its item first, at the risk that the other party may not reciprocate), both parties send their items to the escrow service, which holds them until both items are received, then sends each on to the intended recipient. If either party fails to deliver its part of the deal, the other party's item will be held at the escrow service and eventually returned. Read more...
The "night singer of shares" sold stock on the streets during the South Sea Bubble. Amsterdam, 1720.
"Pump and dump" (P&D) is a form of securities fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements, in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price. Once the operators of the scheme "dump" sell their overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money. This is most common with small cap cryptocurrencies and very small corporations, i.e. "microcaps". See Microcap stock fraud.
While fraudsters in the past relied on cold calls, the Internet now offers a cheaper and easier way of reaching large numbers of potential investors through spam email, bad data, social media, and false information. Read more...- The fiddle game uses the pigeon drop technique. A pair of con men work together, one going into an expensive restaurant in shabby clothes, eating, and claiming to have left his wallet at home, which is nearby. As collateral, the con man leaves his only worldly possession, the violin that provides his livelihood. After he leaves, the second con man swoops in, offers an outrageously large amount (for example $50,000) for what he calls a rare instrument, then looks at his watch and runs off to an appointment, leaving his card for the mark to call him when the fiddle-owner returns. The "poor man" comes back, having gotten the money to pay for his meal and redeem his violin. The mark, thinking he has an offer on the table from the second conspirator, then buys the violin from the fiddle player who "reluctantly" agrees to sell it for a certain amount that still allows the mark to make a "profit" from the valuable violin. The result is the two con men are richer (less the cost of the violin), and the mark is left with a cheap instrument.
The fiddle game may be played with any sufficiently valuable-seeming piece of property; a common variation known as the pedigreed-dog swindle uses a mongrel dog upsold as a rare breed but is otherwise identical. An episode of the television series Hustle, "Cops and Robbers", employs this variation of the fiddle game, as does The Streets' song "Can't Con an Honest John". Read more... - This is a list of fictional portrayals of confidence tricks found in television and the movies. Read more...
- Petters Group Worldwide was a diversified company based in Minnetonka, Minnesota that was turned into a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme by its founder and CEO, Tom Petters. It had 3,200 employees and investments or full ownership in 60 companies, of which it actively managed 20, with offices in North America, South America, Asia, and Europe. Among its assets were Sun Country Airlines, Petters Warehouse Direct, and the remnants of Polaroid. Petters Group Worldwide had $2.3 billion in revenue in 2007.
On September 24, 2008, its headquarters and the homes of its top executives and some associated businesses were raided by the FBI. Wiretaps based on information gleaned from a confidential co-conspirator are alleged to detail the existence of a $2 billion investment fraud. The allegations include creating phony purchase orders from Sam's Club and BJ's to create the appearance of tremendous sales of merchandise. CEO Tom Petters is the central figure in the investigation. A federal court appointed Doug Kelley, a lawyer, as receiver for the Petters companies, excluding bankrupt Sun Country. Read more... - The Welsh Thrasher faith scam was a scam that targeted people of faith, operating as a Ponzi scheme.
It offered the "marks" or targets a combination of a tax avoidance entity (a corporate sole) and a high return investment program or deposit in a fictitious bank or other enterprise. The proposition at the core of the scam was promoted by an Englishman named Howard Welsh and a native of Virginia named Lee Hope Thrasher. Welsh and Thrasher allegedly received US$31,000,000 from about 900 people who believed themselves to be bona-fide investors in so-called "Living Your Sole Purpose" entities. Read more... - An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and one of the most common types of confidence trick. The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, in return for a small up-front payment, which the fraudster requires in order to obtain the large sum. If a victim makes the payment, the fraudster either invents a series of further fees for the victim or simply disappears. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), "An advance fee scheme occurs when the victim pays money to someone in anticipation of receiving something of greater value—such as a loan, contract, investment, or gift—and then receives little or nothing in return."
There are many variations of this type of scam, including the 419 scam (also known as the Nigerian Prince scam), the Spanish Prisoner scam, the black money scam, Fifo's Fraud and the Detroit-Buffalo scam. The scam has been used with fax and traditional mail, and is now prevalent in online communications like emails. Read more... - Domain name scams are types of Intellectual property scams or confidence scams in which unscrupulous domain name registrars attempt to generate revenue by tricking businesses into buying, selling, listing or converting a domain name. The Office of Fair Trading in the United Kingdom has outlined two types of domain name scams which are "Domain name registration scams" and "Domain name renewal scams". Read more...
- Stock Generation was a website that ran from 1998 to early 2000 and is now part of Internet lore as the longest-running, most infamous Ponzi scheme in the history of the Internet. Stock Generation allowed people to trade "virtual companies" using real money and promised enormous returns on investment. Read more...
- Make Money Fast (stylised as MAKE.MONEY.FAST) is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter which became so infamous that the term is now used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam or Usenet newsgroups. In anti-spammer slang, the name is often abbreviated "MMF". Read more...
- Shyster /ˈʃaɪstər/ is a slang word for someone who acts in a disreputable, unethical, or unscrupulous way, especially in the practice of law, sometimes also politics or business. Read more...
- Coin-rolling related scams are a collection of scams involving coin wrappers (rolls of coins). The scammer will roll coins of lesser value or slugs of no value, or less than the correct number of coins in a roll, then exchange them at a bank or retail outlet for cash.
To prevent these problems, many banks will require people turning in coins to have an account, and will debit the customer's account in the event of a shorted roll. Some banks also have machines to count coins. Read more... - A high-yield investment program (HYIP) is a type of Ponzi scheme, an investment scam that promises unsustainably high return on investment by paying previous investors with the money invested by new investors. Read more...
- The Foundation for New Era Philanthropy was a notorious Ponzi scheme that operated from 1989 until its collapse in 1995 after having raised over $500 million from 1100 donors and embezzling $135 million of this. Most of the money was stolen from Christian religious organizations and charities in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. The scheme was publicly discovered by an accounting teacher at a college in Michigan and by the auditing firm Coopers & Lybrand working with its client, a local religious college in Los Angeles who suffered no loss in its participation. Read more...
- Telemarketing fraud is fraudulent selling conducted over the telephone. The term is also used for telephone fraud not involving selling.
Telemarketing fraud is one of the most persuasive deceptions identified by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Telemarketing fraud often involves some sort of victim compliance whether it involves the victim initiating contact with the perpetrator or voluntarily providing their private information to the offender; thus, fraud victims may experience feelings of shame and embarrassment that may prevent them from reporting their victimization. Read more... - Scott W. Rothstein (born June 10, 1962) is a disbarred lawyer and the former managing shareholder, chairman, and chief executive officer of the now-defunct Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm. He was accused of funding his philanthropy, political contributions, law firm salaries, and an extravagant lifestyle with a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme, one of the largest such in history. On December 1, 2009, Rothstein turned himself in to authorities and was subsequently arrested on charges related to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Although his arraignment plea was not guilty, Rothstein cooperated with the Government and reversed his plea to guilty of five federal crimes on January 27, 2010.
Rothstein was denied bond by U.S. Magistrate Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who ruled that due to his ability to forge documents, he was considered a flight risk. Read more... - Email fraud is the intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual through email. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to defraud people. Email fraud can take the form of a "con game" or scam. Confidence tricks tend to exploit the inherent greed and dishonesty of their victims. The prospect of a 'bargain' or 'something for nothing' can be very tempting. Email fraud, as with other 'bunco schemes' usually targets naive individuals who put their confidence in get-rich-quick schemes such as 'too good to be true' investments or offers to sell popular items at 'impossibly low' prices. Many people have lost their life savings due to fraud. Read more...
- A moving scam is a scam by a moving company in which the company provides an estimate, loads the goods, then states a much higher price to deliver the goods, effectively holding the goods as lien. Read more...
A freshwater swamp in Florida
Swampland in Florida is a figure of speech referring to real estate scams in which a seller misrepresent unusable swampland as developable property. These types of unseen property scams became widely known in the United States in the 20th century, and the phrase is often used metaphorically for any scam that misrepresents what is being sold. Expressions like "If you believe that, then I have swampland in Florida to sell you", suggests the recipient is gullible enough to fall for an obvious fraud. Similar phrases involve "selling" the Brooklyn Bridge or nonexistent "oceanfront property in Arizona". Read more...- A matrix scheme (also known as a matrix sale or site, and as a hellevator, escavator or ladder scheme) is a business model involving the exchange of money for a certain product with a side bonus of being added to a waiting list for a product of greater value than the amount given. Matrix schemes are also sometimes considered similar to Ponzi or pyramid schemes. They have been called "unsustainable" by the United Kingdom's Office of Fair Trading. A matrix scheme is also an example of an 'exploding queue' in queueing theory. Read more...
- Thai Tailor Scam (also known as the Bangkok Tailor Scam) is one of the most common confidence tricks performed in tourist hotspots in Thailand, like Pattaya, Bangkok, Phuket, and beach towns like Khao Lak. Read more...
- The black money scam, sometimes also known as the "black dollar scam" or "wash wash scam", is a scam where con artists attempt to fraudulently obtain money from a victim by persuading him or her that piles of banknote-sized paper in a trunk or a safe are actually currency notes that have been dyed to avoid detection by authorities. The victim is persuaded to pay fees and purchase chemicals to remove the dye, with the promise of a share in the proceeds.
The black money scam is a variation of what is known as advance fee fraud. Read more... - The Russian Business Network (commonly abbreviated as RBN) is a multi-faceted cybercrime organization, specializing in and in some cases monopolizing personal identity theft for resale. It is the originator of MPack and an alleged operator of the now defunct Storm botnet.
The RBN, which is notorious for its hosting of illegal and dubious businesses, originated as an Internet service provider for child pornography, phishing, spam, and malware distribution physically based in St. Petersburg, Russia. By 2007, it developed partner and affiliate marketing techniques in many countries to provide a method for organized crime to target victims internationally. Read more...
Political cartoon by JM Staniforth: Herbert Kitchener attempts to raise £100,000 for a college in Sudan by calling on the name of Charles George Gordon
A confidence trick (synonyms include con, confidence game, confidence scheme, ripoff, scam and stratagem) is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence, used in the classical sense of trust. Confidence tricks exploit characteristics of the human psyche, such as credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers Lindsey Huang and Barak Orbach defined the scheme as “a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct, . . . intending to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial,” as they “benefit con operators (‘con men’) at the expense of their victims (the ‘marks’).” Read more...- A mock auction is a scam usually operated in a street market, disposal sale or similar environment, where cheap and low quality goods are sold at high prices by a team of confidence tricksters. Read more...
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Political cartoon by JM Staniforth: Herbert Kitchener attempts to raise £100,000 for a college in Sudan by calling on the name of Charles George Gordon
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