(Untitled)

[rickbot]

I haven't had the 'I've run out of petrol, can you spare five pounds?' con for a while, so it was like being reunited with an old friend when a middle aged black lady tried it on me the other day on Holloway Road. Unfortunately I think she got all confused with the more common 'I've locked myself out' con, as instead of asking for five pounds for

Comments

[vardebedian]

I've always suspected the triviality of the sums involved were a bit of a giveaway - who the hell gets into a pickle that can really be solved by a gift of £1.50? So I thought of running a con in which I claim to be quite rich but to have mislaid all forms of payment (perhaps because mugged - that would reduce the cost of props from nice suit to utterly fucked up suit), and that I need (say) £65 for a taxi home. I'd only try it on people who looked rich and greedy (so almost anyone in London) and offer as proof of ID a business card of some sort and as acknoweldgement of the risk my benefactor was taking and the favour they'd be doing me offer to pay back the sum with 100% interest as soon as I got home. I reckon some people would take that gamble and you could make a few grand a day, so long as you never tried it in the same spot twice.

[rickbot]

I was about to say "that's a real con!" but what I think I mean is "that's a con I saw once on the terrible tv-show Hustle".

[vardebedian]

Glad I don't watch Hustle then, if the writers can't come up with a better con than I can by thinking about it for about three seconds.

[editor]

A man in a suit at Victoria once asked me for three pounds to buy some sort of pastry thing from Délice de France. "I can afford it," he assured me, "I just haven't got the cash on me." Evidently he couldn't be bothered to walk over to the cash machine - a condition with which I could easily empathise - so I gave him the money.

[absinthecity]

My one usually claims to be a Nurse. Everyone loves a nurse...

[vardebedian]

But the implication is that they are making an appeal to charity, which is idiotic. People aren't motivated (much) by charity, they are motivated by greed and lust and idiocy. A good con is not slightly dressed-up begging, it looks like the chance to get something for nothing with a slight but manageable risk. If this is the current zenith of British conmanship I might try it for myself.

[vigornian]

They're also motivated by a desire to correct things and right injustices. Well, some people are. It makes them feel good, even self-righteous, to give to those in need.

The con you're thinking of is another type which plays on people's desire for money / sex. But yes, it's still a type of desire just as the self-righteous one is.

All is vanity, etc.

(What do you mean when you say people are motivated by idiocy?)

[vardebedian]

That motive is too high a word for a lot of what people do; that reason is often (maybe always, not sure) more a tool for ex post facto rationalisation than an aid to good decision-making; that, for the purposes of a con for example, it is worth considering that idiocy is an important factor in decisions and behaviour so trying merely to manipulate greed or even charity faces it as an obstacle.

[jvvw]

A few months back I had fun forcing one of those con people who claimed they were pregnancy to have a long conversation about pregnancy and asked lots of pregnancy-related questions before we discovered that I only had coppers in my purse :) Wonder whether she would have tried a different story if she'd realised that I was pregnant or whether pregnant women are more likely to be sympathetic to other pregnant women.