As we all know, fraud and confidence schemes are crimes. More specifically,
non-violent crimes that seldom receive any serious attention. And for this our
nation's con artists rejoice! As one career con man told me, "Taking money from
suckers has become so damned easy and profitable that I'm starting to feel
guilty."
David Maurer once noted that, "Despite the growing importance of
professional crime in the modern world, the dominant culture has made painfully
slow progress in dealing with it. Perhaps one reason for this delay is the fact
that we insist on dealing with crime without first understanding it." This view
nicely explains our ineffective attempts at curbing confidence crimes.
With little or no specialized training, our nation's law officers are expected
to fully understand the many details separating one scam from another, identify,
locate, and apprehend out of state offenders, and carefully document the
elements of the crime. Absent any clue of how to investigate such offenses often
results in verbose reports that contain everything but an accurate portrayal of
what occurred. Anyone reading these fanciful tales of woe must wrongfully
conclude that the victim is a complete and deserving idiot. And once again --
the con artists rejoice.
In providing a description of how the most common confidence crimes work, I hope
to dispel many of the persistent, persuasive and unrealistic myths surrounding
these crimes and in so doing make life a lot more unpleasant for the deceivers.
