The Art of the Con

MARY-ANN:
We’re in New York City, in the mid-1840s. The streets are busy with men rushing to work. Horses and carts rattle past. Among them is a smartly dressed man. He looks purposeful - but he isn’t on his way to work. His name is William Thompson. Or Samuel Powel. Or James Thompson. It depends on the day.

MARIA:
He had this wonderful shtick where he would walk down the streets of New York and say, "Excuse me," to very, you know, well-dressed, dapper gentlemen, and he was a very well-dressed, dapper gentleman himself.

MARY-ANN:
Maria Konnikova is a writer and psychologist who’s spent years exploring the tricks and history of the confidence game.

MARIA:
And he would say, "Excuse me, um, have you the confidence in me to lend me your watch until tomorrow?"

MARY-ANN:
It’s a bold opening move.

MARIA:
That's just such a baffling request, right?

It was also kind of brilliant because back then, you know, we're still, we're in the 1800s, like, gentleman's code. You're a gentleman, I'm a gentleman. One of the unspoken things about being a gentleman is that we can trust each other's word, right? A man's word is his bond.

MARY-ANN:
And so, although slightly flummoxed, many of the gentlemen fish in their pockets, and pull out a watch. They’re heavy, ornate instruments, made of gold, silver, or brass.

MARIA:
What happens if I give you my watch that I'm saying, 'Oh, yes, I'm a gentleman worthy of trust. You're a gentleman worthy of trust. Yes, of course I have the confidence in you, um, to give you my watch until tomorrow.'

MARY-ANN:
And with that, William pockets the watch, and sets off down the street.

MARIA:
And obviously he would never give them back. He's gone.

MARY-ANN:
That’s it. It’s so simple.

Over the next couple of years, William keeps up his trick. Always using the same 13 words: "Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?"

Until one day, he approaches someone who recognises him. William hasn’t realised, but he’s targeted this very same man before. The police are called, and he’s locked up.

MARIA:
He had quite the collection of watches in his hotel room. And obviously that wasn't all the watches he took because he'd sell some, you know, to keep up his dapper gentleman image.

MARY-ANN:
He’s thought to have duped at least 100 people into handing over their precious watches.

On the 8th of July 1849, the New York Herald publishes the story of his arrest - and gives him the name that will stick: the “confidence man.”

MARIA:
That is where the term confidence man originates. So people often mistake confidence man, confidence artist as thinking it means confidence as in I'm a confident person, right? I, I have the belief in myself. But it doesn't. It means confidence in the sense of trust.

Do you trust me to do what I say I'm going to do? Will you give me your confidence, right? Will you give me your trust?

MARY-ANN:
We use any number of shortcuts to decide if someone’s trustworthy - reputation, status, or simply because they look or sound like us. The confidence man, William Thompson, understood something fundamental: yes, you can use those shortcuts to make someone trust you. But sometimes, it’s about making them want to prove their trustworthiness to you.

That basic idea has fuelled some extremely brazen cons ever since.

So why do we fall for it? How do conmen exploit the shortcuts our brains use to decide who to trust?

I’m Mary-Ann Ochota, an anthropologist and archaeologist, and this is Trust Forward, a history podcast looking at how humans have decided who, and what, to believe.

We’ve already seen some of the ways trust has been made, from the invention of money to the scientific method. This episode is about the ways it’s been broken.

Episode Three: The Art of the Con.

MARY-ANN:
Now, we kinda love stories of, of con artists. We love- We do ... stories of heists and, you know, scams. Why are we so obsessed with tales of people having the wool pulled over their eyes or, or getting conned, of having their trust broken?

MARIA:
I think one of the reasons that we're so obsessed with con artists comes in the name itself.

MARY-ANN:
Maria has spent years immersing herself in the world of fraudsters for her book The Confidence Game, which unpacks the psychology of the con.

MARIA:
Just think about how we refer to them, right? As artists, as people who are master craftsmen. We're not, you know, when we talk about other criminals, we're not like, "He's an artist of theft," right? No, we say "He's a, he's a thief." But con artists, it feels like, it's a crime of finesse, being conned, ah, it feels like a little bit at a remove, that it probably won't happen to me. And also, it's bloodless most of the time, right? So it's much easier to admire something that feels like it's a mind game almost,

MARY-ANN:
Mm, okay. It's the sleight of hand

MARIA:
Exactly. Why do we like to go to magic shows, right? Why do we like to be deceived? Because it's kind of that reveal, that ability to capture our attention, and con artists take a lot of the principles of magic and they obviously use them to quite nefarious ends. But I think our mind is captivated for the exact same reason. I mean, I absolutely was. Obviously, I wrote a book about them, um, and it was a world in which I lived for many, many years, and I'm now writing a book about cheating, right? And cheats. So those types of things are, are questions that are very interesting to me.

MARY-ANN:
There’s one name that everybody knows: Charles Ponzi. He arrived in America from Italy in 1903, a bright-eyed 21-year-old, even though he only had a couple of dollars to his name.

Eventually, he became one of the most notorious fraudsters in history.

MARIA:
So Charles Ponzi lived in Boston, um, which is also where I happen to be from.

MARY-ANN:
Charles had always been a gambler, and by this point, he’d already spent time in prison for forgery and immigration offences. But setting up in his new home in Boston, he spotted an opportunity to exploit something he understood well: people’s appetite for a quick return.

His scheme was simple. He’d approach people with an offer too good to refuse: give me your money, and I’ll make you a fortune.

MARIA:
"Hey, if you invest with me, I can give you a 50% profit, um, if you invest with me for, like, a month." That sounds pretty good, right? "And if you let me keep your money for even longer, then I'll give you 100% profit."

MARY-ANN:
So every dollar they invested, they were gonna get $2 back

MARIA:
They were gonna get $2 back exactly. and this sounded really legitimate, right? It, it sounds like, oh, you know, this sounds kind of cool.

So that's the mechanism. You keep getting an influx of new money, um, in order to pay off your existing client base, and you hope there's no run on the bank.

MARY-ANN:
Whilst creaming off the top

MARIA:
Exactly. 'Cause you keep having new investments, so you just use it for yourself, right? And you fund your own lavish lifestyle

MARY-ANN:
And through the course of a year, he became a multimillionaire. Now this is the 1920s. That's a lot of, lot of, lot of cash

MARIA:
And he was able to do that by really infiltrating the Boston community. So Boston is a town with a lot of old money, right? The Boston Brahmins. There's a lot of, uh, old blood there. You know, the Mayflower came to Massachusetts, it was really a place of a lot of concentrated wealth. And if you could get in with the right people, then all of a sudden, because it's smaller, right, it's kind of a small world, word of mouth, et cetera, all of a sudden money started coming in, and that's exactly what Charles Ponzi did.

MARY-ANN:
Mm-hmm.

MARIA:
He was able to ingratiate himself with the right members of Boston society. And the way that con artists operate quite often is by starting with a few people who are trusted by others in the community, and if you can get the right ones on your side, then all of a sudden you seem trustworthy by association. He also knew to infiltrate kind of the people who made the city run. So a lot of his investors were police officers. One of the things I love about the Ponzi scheme is that when tips started coming in that, "Hey, we think that something might not be quite right," those tips went to the police, and the police said, "No, like absolutely not. He's totally legit. I invest with him," right? That's one of the reasons why so many con artists are able to operate for as long as they do. Um, and because people don't want to admit that they've been conned, and in this particular case, they don't wanna lose money. You know, not all cons are about money, but in this particular case, it absolutely was.

MARY-ANN:
So what happened to him? What happened, Maria?

MARIA:
First, lots of great things happened, right? He became incredibly wealthy. He started living large.

MARY-ANN:
He’s thought to have taken around $15 million from his victims. That’s about a-quarter-of-a-billion in today’s money.

MARIA:
And then because the police wouldn't investigate, tips started going to newspapers instead, and the newspapers, the journalists started investigating. They published a series of articles that didn't say he was a con artist, but, you know, laid out some of the suspicions about what Charles Ponzi was doing, and so there was a run. There was a run on the bank. That's exactly the thing that you want to avoid if you're a Ponzi scheme. So people started panicking. They started wanting their money back. And he couldn't pay.

MARY-ANN:
The scheme collapsed. Charles was arrested, and in 1920 he was sent to prison.

But getting caught didn’t stop him. When he got out just three years later, he picked up where he’d left off, and he was arrested again.

MARIA:
And this cycle repeated multiple times. This happened enough times that he faced, uh, deportation to Italy.

MARY-ANN:
He eventually ended up in Brazil, where he died aged 66 with very little money to his name.

MARIA:
The victim's impact was huge. There are definitely people who ended up losing everything.

MARY-ANN:
The fallout of cons like these can be very different. Oftentimes, they’re devastating. Some of Charles’ victims lost their life savings.

Whereas William Thompson, the original confidence trickster of 1840s New York, stuck to stealing watches.

MARIA:
In this particular case, like, you know, I can't help but be amused. Like, it's funny.

MARY-ANN:
But the mechanics are very similar.

In each case, the conman was selling the same thing: a reason to trust him, and a reason for his victim to believe the risk was worth taking.

And then there was Victor Lustig.

MARIA:
Whose nickname was Count Lustig because he told everyone he was a count.

MARY-ANN:
He wasn’t. He was born in today’s Czech Republic, and split his time between New York and Paris.

MARIA:
Very famous con artist who was very successful. Uh, was able to sell the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal not once, but twice

MARY-ANN:
*Laughs*

MARIA:
to two different groups of investors. And he had something called the 10 Commandments of Con Artists

MARY-ANN:
Here are some of those Ten Commandments: Never look bored. Never be untidy. Never get drunk. Find out what someone’s beliefs are - political, religious - and agree with them. Never boast; let people work out for themselves that you’re important. Don’t pry into their personal lives - they’ll tell you everything eventually.

MARIA:
And one of the 10 Commandments, is a con artist isn't a good talker. A con artist is a good listener. So just think about that for, for a second, right? The superpower is listening, seeing, observing, figuring out what makes this person tick, and then acting on that. The person who approached you actually probably did a quick read on you and your face, the way that you looked, the way you were acting, and decided to approach you and not that other person, right? Because you looked like you would be the better victim because they were listening, and so they victim profiled you. Sorry.

MARY-ANN:
Oh. Ah, there's a, there's a gullible one. We'll go for her. Great. Thanks very much

MARIA:
It's not gullibility. It's not gullibility. It's the fact that you're a good person. So reframe it

MARY-ANN:
Oh, thank you. That's very kind, Maria.

MARIA:
And that's what con artists are banking on, right? That is what they are relying on,You know, we want to see ourselves as good. We want to see ourselves as helpful. So when people ask me, like, "Maria, have you ever been conned?" I was like, "Well, not that I know of, but I'm sure that I've sometimes given money to someone who didn't actually need it, and I'm sure I've been conned in those small ways, and, like, I'm okay with that," right? Because I want to live in a world where, like, I still help.

SOPHIE:
We want to believe people. Humans are terrible at spotting liars.

MARY-ANN:
This is Professor Sophie Scott, our resident cognitive neuroscientist from University College London. She’ll be with us throughout the series to help us figure out the science.

SOPHIE:
There are lots and lots of, you know, different theories about what people do when they're lying, and of course, none of it actually works because when I was doing my undergraduate degree, I remember we read that when people are lying, they look away more. But actually, also when people are lying, they quite often look a lot to see if they're, they're getting away with the lie, you know? And actually, the bottom line is we kind of want to believe people, because our social networks depend on trust and bonding. You know, they w- if you start all interactions with, "Well, I don't know where we're going with this. He's up to something," then we'll never get anywhere. We need those bonds. So I think our default position is to be trying to make a bond, and our default position therefore in lies is that it's unlikely somebody would lie to you.

MARY-ANN:
Is this something that we should go, "Actually, we should just be much less trusting of everything"? Or, or do you say, you know, the vast majority of the time, actually that is what makes our social fabric, you know, it lubricates all those social interactions. We wouldn't get anything done if we didn't trust, even though sometimes it burns our fingers.

SOPHIE:
Exactly. Exactly that. We are social primates, we completely depend on that social network. It's not a reason not to sometimes think, "Let's just do a little fact check on that." But it is, you know, if we all just started from the position of, "Oh, this person's lying to me and they're up to something," we would be a disaster for humans. It's good to be in places where actually the default position is still a positive one.

MARY-ANN:
If trust stopped being the default setting for our day-to-day interactions, everything would grind to a halt.

Over time, we’ve invented ways to protect ourselves from people who abuse our trust: police forces that investigate fraud, journalists who expose scams, banks, regulations, identity checks. Layer-upon-layer of safeguards designed to make trust a little less risky.

And maybe that’s why we have a fascination with hearing stories about people who’ve broken those rules - who’ve taken a lie further than most of us could imagine.

And in some rooms, we’ve turned that fascination into a game. A game where trust goes out of the window, deception is expected, and getting it right can make you very rich.

MARIA:
When you're playing poker, the most stressful moment is a final table

MARY-ANN:
Maria isn’t just an expert in conmen, she’s also a pro poker player. She began playing ten years ago, with no idea that what began as research for a book would become a whole new branch to her career.

MARIA:
I still remember my first ever big tournament win, um, in The Bahamas, um, at the PCA, the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, so I'm walking, you know, the beautiful Caribbean through this resort. You know, the sun is shining. Everything... You know, birds are singing, and here I am, just like an absolute mess of nerves, thinking I am about to play my first ever huge final table.

MARY-ANN:
The stakes are huge.

MARIA:
First place was over $100,000, So I, I, I'm just... I'm not very, uh, even-keeled at this point.

I just walk in and, you know, everyone is there, and I see the bright lights

MARY-ANN:
The competition is unimaginable. She’s up against the biggest names in poker: Chris Morman, an elite player from the UK; Harrison Gimbel, an American who won this same championship when he was just 19, the youngest player ever to do so; and Loek van Wely from Holland, a master chess player. They’ve all been playing for years. Maria only started learning a year ago.

MARIA:
Their goal is to deceive you because that's poker. Their goal is to take your money. And so you have to kind of change your focus to that and try to figure out, you know, who is this person? How do they see me? You know, how will they try to take advantage of my trust? And how can I turn it on its head?

MARY-ANN:
Maria’s mentor, the world-renowned Eric Seidel, who’s trained her for this moment, is watching from the sidelines.

MARIA:
To come and s- wish me luck and support me at the final table, and that just like, you know, made me almost cry. Like, I was like, "Thank you so much." Um, and I, I'm like: What do I do? Like, do you have any advice? And he's like, "Don't be a fish." Um, and a fish is someone who's a bad poker player, you know, who can be caught, reeled in by the sharks, by the good poker players. Um, and that just made me laugh, you know. It was very funny 'cause that's when you realize, like, you've made it here, you've made it this far. Now all you can do is just play well.

MARY-ANN:
But Maria has one big advantage. Nobody there knows who she is.

MARIA:
All they knew was that I was a journalist writing about poker, and they saw a girl, right? They saw a female. They saw someone who, you know, is not very experienced, and they probably projected all of their views of how women play, um, how girls play, you know, play like a girl, um, onto me. And they knew nothing about my game, right? The way that I actually played. And so they weren't playing me. They were just playing whatever stereotype they had of amateur female players.

Once you start playing, the nerves will go away. Just focus on every decision. Focus on what you can do in the moment,, and don't think about, am I doing it correctly? Am I making the right decision? Am I making the wrong decision? And if you do make the wrong decision and you realize it, just move on. Forget about it because it's in the past, and just one hand at a time.

And so as I sit down, I just take deep breaths and I think, "hand by hand, decision by decision, moment by moment, you've got this,"

and it works. I end up winning.

MARY-ANN:
No!

MARIA:
Yeah. So that was my first big one.

MARY-ANN:
It was the first of many. In 2023, Maria was awarded a World Series of Poker bracelet. That’s one of the most prestigious titles you can get.

MARIA:
I had never played poker in my life. So this was something that I did from scratch because I was interested in the nature of control and learning to distinguish between skill and chance, right? The things that we control in life versus the things that we don't control. And poker is just an absolutely beautiful way of learning how to do that in a controlled environment, right?

MARY-ANN:
So you're a professional poker player. I mean, poker player, you're the con man, right?

MARIA:
No, because poker is a game where deception is part of the game, right? The definition of someone who is a con artist is someone who uses your confidence, right, your trust that you give to them for their own nefarious ends, right? And not what they said that they were going to do. But if you sit down to play a game of poker it's just kind of rules of the game.

MARY-ANN:
Poker is partly playing the odds of the, the pack of cards but then it's also playing the other people around the table. What have you learned about humanity from your time playing poker?

MARIA:
Yeah, poker is definitely this beautiful blend of the mathematical and the psychological. Um, I count on my fingers, by the way, uh, Mary-Ann. I'm much stronger on the psychology, It's like, you know, a therapy session on steroids because everyone is in this pressure cooker, right? You have to make lots of decisions under pressure. There's time pressure, there's financial pressure. You start getting tired. All of these dynamics start, um, emerging, and so you learn a lot about people from watching how they play, watching how they react to adversity, right? At the poker table, you're using it to say, "Okay, how do I outplay you? How do I take your money?"

But outside of poker, what a superpower, right? I think that s- poker really teaches you empathy and how to be almost a better friend and a better human because you have to be so in tune with other people that if you then take that and in real life, I'm not looking to take your money, I'm just looking to be attuned with how you're feeling, right? So I've become much better at reading kind of subconscious cues that people are giving out, at reading their body language, at reading shifts in kind of their mental state, their behaviors, things that they might not verbalize to you, but also going back to the, our subject, that's also the superpower of con artists.

They are people who are very well able to get into other people's heads, and I don't sell you the version of the world as it exists. I sell you the world as you see it and as you think it should be. I exploit your hopes, your dreams, your fears, and I project it back to you.

MARY-ANN:
It seems that the same thing that makes a good poker player - reading people - can also make you the perfect conman.

We’re not that good at spotting liars. Because most of the time, trust isn’t a mistake. It’s the very thing that makes society work. We trust things like reputations, recommendations, and institutions because doing everything for ourselves would be impossible.

And that’s exactly what the conman is counting on. They take the trust systems we’ve built, and use them against us. We’ll see later in the series how that’s taken on a whole new dimension in the digital world.

But the conman is a lone wolf. What happens when the criminal stops working alone, and becomes part of a group?

FEDERICO:
Mainstream society is better equipped to solve the trust problem because we operate in the open. In the underworld, it's much more pervasive.

REBECCA:
Pirates needed this aspect of trust to survive

MARY-ANN:
Next time, we’re delving into the worlds of pirates and the Mafia, to uncover the strange ways criminals have learnt to trust each other.

MARY-ANN:
Trust Forward is a podcast from Sumsub, AI-powered trust infrastructure for compliance operations at scale. It’s made in collaboration with This is Distorted.

It’s hosted by me, Mary-Ann Ochota. It’s written and produced by Anna Staufenberg. Our Executive Producers are Alex Jungius and Anna Brusnik.

Thanks for listening.