"So tell me about con games," I requested trying to recover.
She shifted into a more comfortable position and began. "First of all, there are short cons and long cons. A short con is usually a single interaction in which the mark is cheated and the con artist disappears. If the con artist is good, the mark may never even know he was taken. In the long con, the con artists gets to know the mark to some extent and creates some kind of illusion that the mark buys into. Con man is short for confidence man because he works his way into the mark's confidence. Often times the targets of a long con will have bought into the illusion so far that they refuse to believe that they were fooled even when abundant evidence of the con has been revealed to them. The short con nearly always works on a person's greed or inattentiveness. The long con usually exploits some other vulnerability such as loneliness or fear. However, many long cons also work on greed."
"You mean that if nobody was lonely, greedy or afraid then cons wouldn't work?"
"Most long cons wouldn't work under those conditions," she agreed. "But short cons might."
"Give me an example of a classic short con."
"Here is a simple one. I go into a busy sandwich shop at lunchtime and order a sandwich that is around four dollars so it comes out to four dollars and change. I fish around in my purse looking for the exact change until the busy cashier becomes clearly impatient. Then I apologize for holding up the line and hand the cashier a twenty. She will hand back fifteen dollars and some change. I turn to leave and then whoop saying I found the change, I knew it was in there some where. I pull out a small purse, take the exact change out of the purse, and hand it to the cashier. Then I ask for my twenty. The busy cashier just wants to get rid of me and hands me the twenty forgetting that she had also given me change for the twenty. If she catches me, I just claim that I made a mistake. If she doesn't catch me, I've made fifteen dollars."
"How often does that work," I asked. "I find it hard to believe that someone would fall for that."
"When I explained it to you," Gita responded, "you knew it was a con and were looking for the hook. In a busy sandwich shop when your guard isn't up, it is much harder to catch. The con artist is usually physically attractive and sincere looking. Most of the time the cash register is short at the end of the day and nobody remembers the con. Even if the con artist gets caught, it is very difficult to prosecute. The amount taken in any shop is very small and it is difficult to prove that it wasn't just an honest mistake."
"O.K., but how often does it work?" I persisted.
"A lousy con can make it work one time out of four. A polished con can get it to work every time. In a city where there are lots of busy shops in close proximity, you can take in several hundred a day."
"That isn't really that much money," I observed. "Couldn't they make as much doing something honest?"
"Maybe or maybe not," she replied. "For most con artists, they view their work as a profession not as a crime. When they are caught, they feel inconvenienced. Most con artists couldn't hold down a real job."
I nodded, working out in my head how many shops a con would have to hit in order to make several hundred dollars. "You would have to hit twenty shops successfully in order to get three hundred dollars in one day." I observed. "Figuring ten minutes per shop that's two hundred minutes or just over three hours."
"Right," agreed Gita. "If you start at 11:00 and work till 2:30 you cover lunch rush and make your quota. Don't forget that for a con artist this is a full time job. Chances are he will work one short con during lunch and maybe another in the early afternoon."
"For example?" I pressed.
"Let's take a team con this time," Gita continued. "You take a twenty dollar bill and write newspaper and shaving cream on it. Then you give it to me and I go into a drug store and buy a pack of cigarettes with it. You follow me into the store and buy a newspaper and shaving crème and give the cashier a five. When the cashier gives you your change you turn to walk away and then turn back and claim that you gave the cashier a twenty. By this time the cashier will have put the bill you gave her in the cash drawer. She will probably remember the five but you argue with her. She becomes less convinced as you argue. Then you said, "I can prove I gave you a twenty. I wrote my shopping list on it." She will take the twenty that I gave her out of the drawer, see the words you wrote on it and apologize for her mistake. She will never suspect that I was a part of it."
"I sounds to me like these short cons are nickel and dime cons," I observed. "It probably pays the bills, but it's hard to get rich that way. What do you have to do if you want to make some real money?"
"For that you need the long con," she said, removing her shoes and putting her feet up on the black leather ottoman.
I left my shoes on but leaned back into couch and got more comfortable. "Tell me about the long con."
"I just gave you two examples of the short con," she recounted. "There are easily hundreds of variations. The same is true of the long con. But they all follow a similar pattern. You find a vulnerable mark, hook them, bleed them, and then disappear when they run out of money or are about to discover you."
"Give me an example."
"O.K. there is a classic long con known as a Ponzi scheme. Charles Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who noticed that you could make money by buying international postage coupons in Italy for a dollar and selling them in the United States for four dollars. Having stumbled on to this unbelievable good fortune, the only thing that held Ponzi back from cashing in on it was his lack of investment capital. He convinced a few friends to loan him money promising to pay back fifty or a hundred percent within a month. Ponzi, of course, was making three hundred per cent so paying a hundred was no big deal. As word spread around, more and more people wanted to get in on the scheme. The only problem was that there were a limited number of international postage coupons so there was a limit to the amount of cash Ponzi could use. However, Ponzi was not one to turn down cold hard cash. Once he exceeded the number of postal coupons he just kept taking money and using it to pay interest to previous investors while keeping the rest of the money for himself. Today we call this a pyramid scheme, but back in those days people were less sophisticated. It kept working as long as people kept investing. Unfortunately, when suspicions caused people to stop pouring money into it, the whole scam fell apart.
"And Ponzi got busted," I added.
"Not really," Gita continued. "Pyramid schemes were not illegal back in those days. They actually had to nail him for mail fraud because he notified his investors of their earning by post card. Otherwise, he would probably have gotten away with it."
"So there is a really a guy named Ponzi behind the Ponzi scheme?" I inquired.
"Well, there is a real guy," Gita agreed. "But Charles Ponzi was just an alias."
"It's interesting that they got him for mail fraud," I observed. "If he had done that today and notified his clients by email, they wouldn't have been able to touch him."
While I was musing over this, Gita went over to a rosewood cabinet and took out a bottle of Amontillado and two sherry glasses. She filled the glasses and left the bottle on top of the cabinet.
"Apparently, that's the problem with Internet scams," she said as she handed me a glass and sat down on the couch. "If the same scams were done via regular mail, the postal inspector could nail them. But when they pull these cons over the web, postal laws don't apply."
I nodded and sipped my wine. It was rich, sweet and heady with a flavor like a mixture of caramels and hazelnuts. We talked about hacking web sights, cracking passwords and IP spoofing. I came up a dozen great cons that could be pulled over web, each of course illustrating a different principle. The bottle seemed to evaporate in front of us. The office was warm and I was feeling lazy. I put my glass on the table and nestled into the couch, closing my eyes to think for just a moment.
I was sitting in a little car that was in the bed of a pickup truck. The pickup truck was on the bed of a flatbed truck. The flatbed truck had an IP address on the hood. We were barreling down the highway at a terrifying speed until the truck pulled off the road into a large station marked "Router". My little car was taken out of the bed of the pickup and placed on a flatbed train car. The train took off, speeding down the track. At the next station, my car was taken off the train and put on another flatbed truck. Eventually, I arrived at city where I got out of my car. A patrolman at the gate said "you aren't where you think you are." Another patrolman said "you aren't who you say you are." A third patrolman started shaking me. He shook me till I woke up. It was Gita. She had changed back into her navy blue skirt suit.
"You have to wake up Tad," she said. "You have to take me to the airport."