The Confidence Game

by Maria Konnikova

  After reading the story, participants answered a series of questions about the events, the characters, policies about psychiatric care, and the like. Then came the key question: were there any false notes in the narrative, statements that either contradicted something or simply didn’t make sense? Green and Brock, the study’s authors, called this “Pinocchio circling”: did any elements of the story signal falsehood akin to Pinocchio’s nose? The more engrossed a reader was in the story, the fewer false notes she noticed. The sweep of the narrative trumped the facts of logic.

  What’s more, the most engaged readers were also more likely to agree with the beliefs the story implied (namely, the types of policies that should go into effect for mentally ill individuals). It didn’t matter what they believed before the story; the tale itself created a new, strong set of views. A well-executed play doesn’t just capture your emotion in the moment; it makes you more susceptible to the precise version of reality a confidence artist wants to create to further his scheme.

  According to a theory of persuasion known as the elaboration likelihood model, we process a message differently depending on our motivation level. If we’re highly motivated, we will focus on and be persuaded by the arguments in the message itself. If we’re not motivated, we’re more likely to be influenced by external cues, like a person’s appearance, what she’s wearing, how she’s talking, and the like. Visceral cues, like the basic emotion brought forth by a powerful story, however, can override even motivation. Instead of processing a message logically, we act like the unmotivated person and take in all the wrong things. That’s the power of the play. Even if we’re trying hard not to get conned, if the play unrolls in the right way, it eventually won’t matter; the narrative sweep will take over.

  The con artist has several possible ways to hook us into the narrative stream. There’s the Katie case—something so awful that we can’t help but empathize. It’s the choice the Sammy Azzopardis of the world make all the time. But there’s also a less directly emotional possibility. The con artist can employ something called “wishful identification.” We don’t feel sorry for the character; we want to be him. He has attained precisely what we want. And don’t we deserve that, too? Now it’s our turn. The more similar the characters in the story are to us, whether because of appearance or social position, the more likely we are to relate to them. The more we like the confidence man, the more we relate to him.

  Richard Harley was making $500 a month on social security benefits when he swindled investors out of $323,000 for an “oil development” in Texas. His approach was quite straightforward: he simply pretended to be wealthy to the tune of hundreds of millions in bank instruments. He was, he told potential clients, the owner of a fine art collection, and had a billion-dollar oil reserve in Texas. It was wishful identification at its finest: invest with me, and you, too, will have all this and more. Don’t you want others to see your exquisite taste? According to his indictment, Harley had been at it since 1999—the con that keeps on giving.

  Harley’s 2014 indictment wasn’t his first encounter with the law. Ends up, he was an expert in all elements of the play, in all its guises. Starting in January 1989, he and his wife, Jacqueline Kube, had the story to beat all stories: a cure for AIDS. For years, they said, they had been searching for something that could overcome the horrible disease. And recently, they’d had a breakthrough. Their medical company, Lazare Industries, had pioneered a treatment that seemed truly “groundbreaking.” What was more, it was completely natural—not the toxic filth that drug cocktails introduced into the body. It was based on ozone and oxygen, two harmless substances that we are all naturally exposed to. A series of enemas, delivered by an “ozone generator” pump, at bursts of thirty to forty-five seconds a day, could cure the disease. The treatment, Harley and Kube went on, had been tested in extensive clinical trials at a major New Jersey hospital. It was one of the only patented approaches for treating the virus. Each treatment cost $250—or $7,500 for an entire month—a small price to pay for a deadly disease.

  Over six years, the couple told their tale in colorful prose, through targeted mailings and ads; they looked at lists of subscribers to popular gay magazines, and tailored their message accordingly. By the time they were charged, in 1996, they had raised over $1.4 million in subscriptions. The treatment, of course, didn’t exist. But the story had been so powerful—and the will to believe so strong—that dozens of people fell victim to false hope. Eventually, Harley served a five-year sentence—and it wasn’t long after his release that he refashioned himself as the oil tycoon of the day.

  Serial con artists like Harley are better at the play than almost anyone else. Yaling Yang came to a temp agency looking for subjects for a study. Yang was a psychologist researching pathological lying. She wanted to see whether, out of the habitually, or at least temporarily, unemployed, she could spot anyone who was also an inveterate fib teller. A possible reason for the unemployment of at least some of the temp workers, she reasoned, was a history of deceitful action at work.

  As Yang walked through the temp agencies of Los Angeles, she asked over one hundred people questions about their past employment, families, and general history. She then checked their responses against court records and accounts from family and friends. Were some consistently inconsistent? Indeed, twelve people stood out. They lied often, and they lied without much incentive. Next, Yang asked everyone, liars and not, to come into the lab for a brain scan. What she found was that the habitual liars had 25 percent more white matter than anyone else.

  Those extra connections also play a crucial role in in-the-moment storytelling, or the ability to spontaneously weave a compelling narrative. In fact, for the normal developing brain, white matter experiences a large jump in volume between the ages of six and ten. That is also the time frame in which most children learn to intentionally lie. What Yang had found, in other words, was that practiced deceivers were better at one of the basic skills of the con: the ability to tell a good story.

  As Epstein puts it, “It is no accident that the Bible, probably the most influential Western book of all time, teaches through parables and stories and not through philosophical discourse.” Narratives, he argues, are “intrinsically appealing” in a way nothing else quite is.

  Sometimes a story is so powerful that it fools even the teller, creating unintentional con artists in the process. Consider the debacle, in the winter of 2014, that surrounded the publication of a major Rolling Stone feature on campus rape at the University of Virginia. It was perfect. A gripping story that couldn’t help but tear at the heartstrings: a young, innocent freshman, Jackie, who doesn’t drink, doesn’t dress provocatively, doesn’t do drugs, and is brutally gang-raped by seven men at one of her first frat parties as part of some perverse initiation. Sabrina Rubin Erdely had done a masterful job, finding a compelling spokesperson for an important social issue. She was interviewed by most every outlet and hailed as a brilliant journalist who had created just about the perfect vehicle to make people sit up and take notice.

  Until those who took notice also noticed some alarming gaps in the story. Where were the attempts to reach the alleged perpetrators? Where were the corroborations from Jackie’s friends? Over the coming weeks, journalists at the Washington Post meticulously re-reported the article, contacting Jackie’s friends, the fraternity, even tracking down two of the alleged perpetrators. The more they learned, the more holes they found, from the relatively mundane (the fraternity in question didn’t have a party the night Jackie had said she’d been to one, and initiations are in spring, not fall) to the more overtly disturbing (Jackie’s friends hadn’t callously stood by; they’d urged her to seek help when she appeared to be in emotional distress). That night, she had said nothing of gang rape, only that she’d had to perform oral sex on several men. And the man who she said she’d gone on a date with: it looked like she had made up texts, photographs, and an entire backstory where none existed. In March, a police investigation concluded t
hat there was “no substantive basis” to say that Jackie had been attacked by any man, let alone a gang. Of course, the police chief couldn’t say that nothing had happened, he hastened to add—there was no way to prove that definitively—but from the perspective of the law, the evidence didn’t pass muster. The investigation was suspended.

  Let’s be clear: the Rolling Stone fiasco was not in any way Jackie’s fault. Memories of traumatic events are notoriously unreliable; details blur and fade; accounts fail to coincide. But it did show what looked like a blatant disregard for a basic journalistic practice: believe, but question. Don’t let your story get away from you. Never turn off your skepticism, no matter how gripping the tale may be. Instead, it was left to the Post to question, where Rolling Stone had just believed.

  And let’s be clear about something else: Erdely wasn’t consciously setting out to con anyone, that we know. She wasn’t, as far as we can tell, a fabricator, a plagiarist, or a malicious bender of the truth. And yet, think about the ones we do now see as fitting that bill—Stephen Glass (the New Republic journalist who fabricated multiple stories over three years at the magazine) or Janet Cooke (the Washington Post journalist who won a Pulitzer for what turned out to be an entirely fictional story; the prize was subsequently revoked) or Jayson Blair (the New York Times writer who fabricated and plagiarized a number of stories) or Jonah Lehrer (the short-lived New Yorker staff writer who plagiarized and fabricated parts of multiple stories and had two of three books pulled by publishers as a result) or even Ruth Shalit (another plagiarizing writer at the New Republic who, like Erdely, had multiple lapses in fact-checking). Perhaps they started out innocently enough, too, getting swept up by the beauty of their narratives. Their stories worked for the very same underlying reason as hers. Perhaps Erdely, like others before her, was just carried away by the arc she’d created. She ended up being conned by the lure of the tale itself, letting down normal journalistic checks in the process; it was the perfect play almost in spite of itself. And Rolling Stone reacted apace. It, too, was enamored of the story. Erdely had sold it so well. They didn’t even need a con artist. They conned themselves.

  We believe because we want to. Con artists are just there to spin the yarn. And even when we think they’ve told their last, they have the uncanny ability to resurface.

  * * *

  In 2010, Dakota Johnson appeared in Brisbane. She was fourteen and had gotten away from a sexually abusive relative, she told the police, and she desperately needed help. She had been traveling to Australia with her European uncle and, along the way, on Lord Howe Island, they’d parted ways—whether because he’d abandoned her or she’d escaped was unclear. Whatever had happened had been traumatic. The Brisbane support system gave her shelter and food. She wanted, she told her support group, nothing more than to go back to school and finish her education, just like any normal teen.

  Johnson had very little with her—she’d left in a hurry and taken what she could. Just a few possessions. Some clothes. A laptop. There was a letter of introduction from Le Rosey, a ritzy private school in Switzerland, on a sprawling campus by Lake Geneva. There was a receipt from a Lord Howe Island bank. And there was the diary, pink. In its pages, a vivid, violent account of sexual abuse by a close relative.

  It wasn’t much to go on. But the authorities wanted to give her a good chance at a normal life—and Le Rosey, well, that was some reference. A local high school accepted her for the following term.

  The police, however, didn’t feel that enough was being done. Schooling was well and good—admirable, in fact. But a child who had been so abused needed, they felt, more assistance. Concerned for her welfare, they searched her computer while she was out.

  There was the smiling girl with her family, standing atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The photo had a date, and that date was a clue. The local police contacted the tour company in charge of bridge tours and asked to see records of the participants. It wasn’t long before they found a match: the twenty-two-year-old Samantha Azzopardi. She wasn’t fourteen at all. And Dakota Johnson? An alias based on the actress who stars in the movie of Fifty Shades of Grey. The Le Rosey letter: a fabrication crafted on her laptop. The bank receipt: another fudged fake. When the police dug deeper, they discovered that Dakota was far from her first foray into conning. At the time she appeared on the Brisbane streets, she was already wanted for fraud in Queensland. It appeared our old friend Samantha Azzopardi had attempted to use a fake Medicare card to procure services in Rockhampton, a small coastal town in the area.

  On September 14, the Brisbane Magistrates Court charged Azzopardi with two counts of false representation, one count of intention to forge documents, and one of contravening directions. She was convicted. The sentence, however, would be lenient; Azzopardi was to pay a $500 fine. The next month, Sammy was again convicted of four counts of false representation: yet another identity, yet another attempt at fraud through sympathy. Again, the charge was $500. And then, for a few months, she dropped off the legal radar.

  But only a few. In 2011, Sammy transformed into Emily Azzopardi, a gymnast, the role borrowed from a past identity as Emily Sciberas. She was a top athlete, she told a new friend in Perth, where she was now living. When she stayed over at her friend’s house—an increasingly common occurrence—she repeated the story to her parents. She’d lived in Russia, she said, to train. And she had been the top under-sixteen gymnast in the country.

  One month later, a disturbing notice appeared on Emily’s Facebook page. Her entire family had died tragically in France. Alongside the announcement, she posted a newspaper article: a murder-suicide. A man had killed his wife and fifteen-year-old daughter before shooting himself. There was, the article said, a twin who had survived. Emily was that twin. Her friend’s family, moved by her plight, asked to adopt her. She would love that, she replied; she was just then in the United States, she told the family, with an adoptions specialist. He would smooth everything over.

  Azzopardi proceeded to steal the identity of a Floridian judge, indeed an adoptions expert, to e-mail the family and receive the requisite adoption paperwork. To finalize everything, she met them in Sydney, claiming she had been raped in Perth and couldn’t go back.

  But when the family enrolled her in school, everything fell apart. Her birth certificate as Emily was, predictably, a fake.

  In 2012, Azzopardi was again sentenced, this time to six months in prison for attempting to illegally collect social welfare benefits. The sentence, however, was suspended for a year—as all her charges had been, every time. She was a lovely girl. In June of that same year, she stood in Perth Magistrates Court to plead guilty to three counts of opening up accounts under a false name, one of inducing someone else to commit fraud, and one of intent to defraud by deceit. On October 2, she was sentenced to six months in prison, again suspended for twelve months.

  Some might call Sammy a pathological liar: someone who is mentally incapable of telling the truth, in the throes of an illness rather than a malicious malingerer. And, in one sense, it’s true. There’s no denying her proclivity for telling a truth that’s as far from reality as they come. Except, for con artists like Sammy, it’s not a pathology; Sammy, you may recall, received a clear mental bill of health. It’s a deliberate choice: it’s the essence of the play. Pathological liars lie for no reason at all. For them, lying is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or may point to a deeper psychopathy. (Indeed, pathological lying is listed as a symptom on the Psychopathy Checklist.) Con artists lie for a very specific reason: personal gain, whether it be financial or other. They lie to set the play in motion, so that they can gain your confidence and then lead you down a reality of their making. And their lies are believable whereas a pathological liar’s are often too big and elaborate to be taken seriously.

  Azzopardi lied in a very deliberate fashion: she crossed a social taboo. An area so rife with emotion that to lie about it would be to betray our trust in humanity. Unfortunately, because of the power of emot
ion, such taboo ruses are far from unique in the confidence game; many a play revolves around the topics that no one would dare question. In fact, the same exact ruse was used by Somaly Mam, the prominent head of a global charity who, as it turned out, had fabricated her own history of sexual abuse. What’s more, she coached the girls her organization was supposed to be helping on the most harrowing—and often untrue—narratives to relay to potential donors. Each girl would “audition” as a face of the charity. As Newsweek reported in an exposé, one girl “confessed that her story was fabricated and carefully rehearsed for the cameras under Mam’s instruction, and only after she was chosen from a group of girls who had been put through an audition.” She was told it was the only way to help other women who really were sex trafficking victims.

  It’s a quintessential Machiavellian dilemma. Do the ends justify the means? Even after it was revealed that Somaly Mam’s foundation was based on a lie (her own story) and had perpetuated further lies to increase funding (coaching girls on the ideal victim story designed to tug at the maximum number of heartstrings as hard as possible), many supporters didn’t abandon her. After all, she had raised money for and awareness of an important cause, and many of the funds had gone to real victims and women in need. Was she a con artist or someone who’d just gone too far?

  It’s no coincidence that cons tend to thrive in the wake of disaster: natural disaster, illness, economic disaster, national disaster, personal disaster. The play is almost built into disaster zones from the start. Emotions are already high. There’s already a compelling story line. We are, in a sense, primed for the grifter to plunge into his game; he doesn’t even have to try all that much to up the emotional ante or think of a dashing good yarn. It’s all there for the taking. In the wake of the Ebola crisis in the fall of 2014, an investigation from a team of reporters at BuzzFeed found that the man who’d been put in charge of the cleanup effort in New York, Sal Pane, was, in fact, a confidence artist and convicted felon, with no proper qualifications in biohazard work. The play, for him, was a matter of child’s play: we are already desperate for someone to step in—and who in his mind would lie about something like that? In the wake of the Iraq War, two enterprising British businessmen, Jim McCormick and Gary Bolton, decided to capitalize on the fear of explosives by marketing a fail-safe bomb detector. They faked a few tests, and soon their first-class machinery—little more than glorified golf ball finders at £1.82 a pop to make—was being sold for as much as £15,000 apiece. Again, a child’s version of the play: a ready-made story, desperate, emotionally vulnerable clients—and once more, who would ever play with people’s lives so callously? Customers flocked, not only from postwar Iraq but from Thailand, Mexico, China, Niger, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Egypt, and Tunisia. Each year, the duo would make millions. And people, confident an area had been swept for bombs, would lose lives. “The culpability and harm of what you were doing is at the highest level,” Justice Hone told Bolton at his sentencing, “because when used for the detection of explosives, in my judgment the use of the GT200 . . . did materially increase the risk of personal injury and death.”