The Confidence Game

by Maria Konnikova

In the early years of the twentieth century, newspapers abounded with ads for almost all manner of things—medicines, miracle workers, business deals, lucrative investment opportunities, land and gold investments, riches galore. One day, however, a new sort of ad appeared in the pages of several dailies: an appeal from a certain Prince Bil Morrison. The prince was of noble birth and hailed from the far reaches of Nigeria. All he wanted was some American pen pals. So moving was the wording of the ad that the papers had published his mailing address free of charge. Should not the poor prince find some good old American correspondents?

  He did find them, and aplenty. After a few letters were sent back and forth to his new friends, Prince Morrison made a simple request: would his American acquaintances send him a mere four dollars, and an old pair of pants they no longer needed? In exchange for such a small thing, he would send them vast quantities of ivory, diamonds, and emeralds. To him, they were but worthless baubles. Friendship, however, was priceless. The money and pants poured in. But where were the promised jewels?

  Complaints flooded the post office. Where was the wealth Prince Bil Morrison had promised to send? Suspecting fraud, the authorities ferreted out the wealthy Nigerian. As they soon discovered, his wealth had been a creation of his fertile mind, as was his nobility. He was American. He was anything but wealthy. And he was fourteen years old.

  Though Bil Morrison’s age stopped further legal action in its tracks, the undeniable success of his letters had proven the worth of the successfully thrown rope. Americans had just been taken in with the first Nigerian mail order con—the old-fashioned predecessor of the e-mail phishing scam that is probably sitting in your spam folder this very minute. (A quick check of mine reveals a note from Elena. “Hello!!!” it begins in great excitement. “My name is Elena. I looked yours profil and have become interested in you.” She’s from Russia, too, she tells me. Cheboksary. “Write to me at once on mine e-mail,” the lovely young lady concludes.)

  The Nigerian fraud is a classic foot-in-the-door approach. Prince Bil made his way up to his requests for money. First it was just a pen pal—something so small and touching even money-conscious newspapers ran his ad for free. Then it was a few letters. Only then was it cash. And pants. The pants, I am at a loss to explain. And look at nice little Elena. She didn’t ask me for a single cent. All she wants is for me to reply to her touching note.

  The foot-in-the-door is also the exact approach Matthew de Unger Brown used with Mervyn Barrett. From the smallest of favors (let me volunteer in your organization) to the largest ask of all (give me access to your bank account). But all accomplished slowly, incrementally, with great patience and finesse. (Not unlike the psychics like Sylvia Mitchell who rope you in with a low-fee reading and proceed to ask for increasingly ludicrous amounts of cash.)

  But niceness isn’t the only way to go. Another effective technique that Cialdini first identified in 1975 is the door-in-the-face, a near opposite of the foot-in-the-door. When someone we don’t really know asks us for a large favor—or even someone we do know catches us on an off day—and we (understandably) refuse, we do indeed feel rude, just as Bem would have predicted. But we don’t like feeling rude. And so we also feel something else we don’t like: guilty. So what happens when the person we turned down asks us for something else, something smaller, something that seems far more reasonable in comparison? We say yes. Guilt assuaged—and con artist’s mission accomplished.

  In fact, Cialdini found, more people agreed to a relatively small request—volunteering to chaperone at the zoo for a few hours (if you think about it, not a small request at all)—after they’d rejected a much larger one—volunteering two hours a week at a juvenile detention facility over a minimum of two years—than if they’d only gotten the smaller request in isolation. Half agreed to it if it came second, while only 16.7 percent agreed to it on its own. Here, though, a confidence man must operate alone. The technique only worked, Cialdini found, if the same person did the asking both times. If you’re nice, you’re nice to everyone. If you’re guilty, only one person can assuage that guilt: the one who caused it in the first place.

  The evening had gotten off to a promising start. Tracy Ward, Marchioness of Worcester, surveyed the room. Slight and elegant, the former actress—she had starred in C.A.T.S. Eyes, a detective series from the eighties, and in Cluedo, as Miss Scarlet, before retiring from the screen—smiled with approval. They were at London’s No. 41, an exclusive Mayfair club that has made its home in the Westbury Hotel, and the room had filled up nicely. The chilly weather hadn’t prevented a brilliant turnout. All for the best, since it wasn’t just any party. Tonight would be the charity auction for the Marchioness’s foundation, Farms Not Factories. The group, dedicated to ethical pig farming, had already drummed up support from an exclusive list. RFK Junior. Sir Paul McCartney. Tom Parker Bowles. And its film series, The Pig Business, was off to a good start. But this evening was important. It would mean fresh funds and fresh endeavors to better the lives of porcines everywhere.

  The Marchioness, Lady Worcester, remembers well the moment when the mysterious young man made his appearance, gliding down the stairs in full evening regalia. Tall, with wavy blond hair, piercing blue eyes, just a hint of a five-o’clock shadow, a touch of foundation framing a perpetual tan. A whiff of expensive aftershave. He didn’t hesitate to seek out the hostess.

  His name, he told her, was Sebastian Von Anhalt, a millionaire from Monaco who just so happened, he said, to be dating one of her acquaintances. He took her arm. Wouldn’t she like to join him at the family compound in Monte Carlo? He laughed often and contagiously. On the spot, he pledged to raise £100,000 for her charity. Tracy Ward wasn’t particularly charmed. “He came across as a drunken upper-class twit,” the Marchioness later recalled. But the offer of money was welcome all the same. Donations were donations, whomever they came from.

  The evening wore on. Von Anhalt worked the room, throwing a smile here, a compliment there. Soon it was time for the auction. Up next: Dittisham Lady. She stood proud, at nine inches of solid bronze. And she stood long, too, measuring twelve inches from nose to tail. She was, after all, a pig. A statue of a black Berkshire sow, by the sculptor Nick Bibby. Von Anhalt signaled his interest. For £4,000, Dittisham Lady was his.

  At this point, Lady Worcester recalls, Von Anhalt took a folded check from a Canadian bank from his pocket. It was for $18,000 Canadian, about $10,000 more than the cost of the statue. Take the proceeds from that amount, he told her. Equal parts baffled and embarrassed, Lady Worcester accepted the paper. Normally, a buyer would not be entitled to his winnings until a check clears. In this case, though, Von Anhalt proved too quick: before anyone could rightly disentangle what was going on, he was out the door and into a cab, the Dittisham Lady tucked snuggly under his arm.

  When the check failed to clear, Ward wasn’t particularly worried. Von Anhalt had seemed rather a twit, true, but a wealthy twit. And his boyfriend was someone she rather liked. She was sorry for the mix-up, she told Von Anhalt. Would he transfer the money directly to the Farms Not Factories account? Certainly he would.

  When the cash failed to appear, Lady Worcester found herself stymied: none of her calls or texts were returned. Whatever she tried, there was silence. Von Anhalt seemed to have evaporated, and the bronze statue along with him.

  She turned to their mutual friend. How could she not have thought of it sooner? It was that connection that had acted as an instant guarantee on their first meeting—the ever-friendly glow of the familiar. Sebastian Von who? Her friend was baffled. Yes, he’d met the young man a few times, but he’d broken off contact after he found he wasn’t “who he claims to be,” he told her. The more Lady Worcester inquired, the stranger the situation became. This, it seemed, was not Von Anhalt’s first offense. “I spoke to more people and found he’s actually this Talented Mr. Ripley type who just goes round wrecking lives,” she told the Sunday Times. The £4,000 was lost, she was afraid, and she felt “blindingly gullible.�
� “He was completely plausible, and utterly brazen,” she later said.

  And it didn’t end there. After his failure to pay, the Marchioness involved the police. Every accusation, said Von Anhalt’s lawyer, was a brazen lie. He didn’t even have the pig. “He even told me to check the club’s CCTV,” she says. They promptly did just that. “It clearly shows him going off with the pig. The maître d’ saw him go off with it. Someone else saw him in the taxi with it.” The lawyers changed their tune. He had the statue, they now said, but he’d come across it lawfully. Everyone had been paid in full. As of this writing, pig and check both remain at large.

  Von Anhalt was in fact the same young gentleman we met earlier in the guise of Matthew de Unger Brown. Only now, instead of the foot-in-the-door as his rope of choice, he came with a full-on door-in-the-face. His first approach to Lady Worcester: an unsuccessful attempt at charm that left her thinking him as something other than charming—her polite demurral of his offer of a visit to Monaco was the cultured way of saying “never” (who would want to spend more than a minute in the “twit’s” company?)—followed by a second favor, far more reasonable-seeming, of honoring a Canadian check. The request, in the moment, seemed a small one. And, as the Marchioness herself admitted, she was feeling embarrassed. It wasn’t usual policy, but, well, maybe this once . . .

  In 1986, Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger proposed a persuasion—or roping, if you will—tactic that relied not on a comparison between two separate favors but on a comparison within the favor itself: the that’s-not-all technique. An effective approach, Burger found, is to start with a false baseline (that is, not at all what you’re planning to eventually propose) and then, in quick succession, make changes and additions to that starting point that make it seem increasingly attractive. You make an initial bid—how would you like to get in on this land deal in Florida?—and before your mark can respond, you turn it into something else. “That’s not all. You also get a guaranteed return on your initial investment.” People who were approached with a that’s-not-all story, Burger found, were more likely to buy into it than those who heard the great offer right away. (The that’s-not-all-ing, incidentally, can continue for a while. You need not stop at one.)

  That’s-not-all is actually a member of a broader set of persuasive tactics, known as disrupt-then-reframe techniques. First you disrupt someone’s understanding of an attempt to influence her, and then you reframe the attempt in a way that makes her more vulnerable to it. Here’s how it works. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert proposes that we understand the world in two stages. First we take it at face value, in order to decipher the sense of what someone is telling us. And then we evaluate it, in order to judge the soundness of what we’ve just deciphered. Disrupt-then-reframe attacks the evaluative part of the process: we don’t have a chance to give a proper assessment because each time we try to do so, the situation changes.

  Consider this illustration. In 1999, Barbara Davis and Eric Knowles, psychologists at the University of Arkansas, went door-to-door selling holiday or note cards—three-dollar holiday or note cards, that is. Not a bargain fifteen years ago, and pricy even today. When the door opened, they greeted the would-be proud owner of a set of cards with one of several pitches. “They are three dollars,” was the simplest. “They are three hundred pennies” was the disruptive approach—it takes a second to evaluate and recalculate. Each of those could, in turn, be followed by either “It’s a bargain”—a way of reframing the offer as positive—or “They’re three hundred pennies . . . that’s three dollars. It’s a bargain,” the disrupt-and-reframe. The only time that people bought more cards than in the control condition—the simple three-dollar request—was when their three hundred pennies were immediately made into three dollars and then immediately remade again into a bargain. Between 65 and 70 percent of people then went on to buy the cards—as compared with a quarter when the price was named alone.

  Disrupt-then-reframe techniques are legitimate sales tactics, but in the hands of con artists, those cards can easily turn into something else—like the perennial favorite of selling bogus health products that are immediately presented at a multi-month discount, and alongside another product that does something equally wonderful and is being thrown in for free. It’s a limited-time offer, of course. Better get ordering.

  In 1984, psychologist Joel Brockner pioneered a new approach, one of the street hustler’s favorites: the even-a-penny-would-help. Similar to the foot-in-the-door, here, asking for a little helps you get a lot. But it’s not quite the same thing. You’re not looking to make two different-size requests. Instead, you’re looking to exploit something known as the “legitimization effect.” A request for a tiny amount of money legitimizes you in the eyes of others. If you were a swindler, you’d ask for a lot, wouldn’t you? If you’d be happy with only a penny, what kind of a thief are you? It works the same way for organizations. If you’re looking for a tiny donation—a dollar or another inconsequential-seeming amount—you look like you’re working hard for very little. You’re not the type of person to go all tricksy on me.

  Glafira Rosales perpetrated one of the largest art frauds of the twentieth century, selling dozens of fake Abstract Expressionist paintings to unsuspecting buyers over the course of twenty years. Her success lay in targeting the Knoedler Gallery, formerly the oldest art gallery in Manhattan, as her seller. And why did the Knoedler trust her? For many reasons (we’ll come to that in a later chapter). But a strong indicator of Rosales’s personal integrity in the eyes of Ann Freedman, the gallery’s then-director, was the fact that Glafira wasn’t focused on money. “She didn’t care how much it sold for,” Freedman told me. “She was quiet, not at all pushy. She deferred to my judgment.” She would be happy, she told Freedman, as long as the art sold “fairly”—and for that fairness, she trusted Freedman implicitly. The prices, of course, did just what you would expect in the even-a-penny scenario: they increased. By a hell of a lot. The more paintings were sold, the more legitimate the collection and provenance appeared, the more money they brought in, and the more Rosales and the Bergantiños brothers (Rosales’s accomplices) were paid. It worked like a textbook charm. But it never would have been possible if the initial starting point hadn’t been a humble one. It was a truly expert rope.

  A closely related approach is Cialdini’s lowball technique. This time, you tell your intended victim that what you want is actually quite small—and once he commits to doing it, raise the stakes. A car salesman can give a ballpark (lowball) estimate on a car. Once the buyer is enamored with the actual car he already thinks he’s buying—a different model altogether from the one initially quoted—he can raise the price: “Actually, sir, this particular model comes with . . .” and so forth. Many a person will say yes where they would have originally said no. It only works, however, if you made your initial decision with a good amount of freedom. If you felt at all compelled or pushed, it can backfire. It’s the con artist’s bait and switch. Bait with one, switch with another. In some ways, one of the oldest cons of all time—the biblical replacement of Rachel with Leah. You have your eye on one model, but . . .

  Most persuasive strategies—the con artist’s rope—work by promising more. But there are, as well, those that operate on Cialdini’s principle of scarcity. The scarce is inherently valuable by very virtue of its scarcity: there isn’t much to go around, so only the very lucky few can have it. The limited edition. The forbidden fruit. The offer only good till midnight. The members-only sale. The collector’s item. Pose something as unique or rare, and takers will line up where there used to be none. It works for goods. It works for information. It works for most anything.

  Bernie Madoff didn’t take investment from just any old sucker. You had to work your way in. You had to earn his trust. Some people tried for months, even years, to get him to accept their investment. It only increased the allure. And insider trading, of course, is built entirely on scarcity—scarcity of information.

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bsp; Rudy Kurniawan, perpetrator of one of the master wine frauds of the century, didn’t let just anyone buy his wines—and never right away. Wilf Jaeger, a wine collector who has known Kurniawan since the start of his foray into the world of fine wines, told me—over a glass of wine, of course—that he’d worked for months to get the charismatic young collector to sell him some of his elusive bottles.

  Kurniawan had come seemingly out of nowhere. A wealthy young financial type, he’d made quite a splash at wine auction after wine auction, buying up expensive lots, throwing millions after the choicest of bottles. Then the dinners started. Not just any wine dinners. The wines served here were as exclusive as they come—some bottles not available for sale anywhere, at any price. The company, too, was a rarefied one. A true sampling of the best in the wine world: the finest tasters, the best-reputed collectors, the cream of the luxury world and high society. People skirmished and angled for an invitation. A Kurniawan dinner was an affair to remember. It certainly didn’t hurt that Rudy himself was an extraordinary taster. Going blind, he could guess most any wine down to the proper vineyard.

  Old-time collectors were, frankly, stunned. Here was a relative upstart, and somehow he was able to get his hands on bottles they’d been tracking for years. How was it possible? Rudy had a secret, he let it be known. He’d unearthed a new private cellar in France, and the owner was shipping him the bottles directly. They had never left the basement, and had been waiting for years for just such a discovery.

  It wasn’t an unprecedented story. New cellars did come to light all the time, Michael Egan, a former wine director for Sotheby’s who specializes in tracking and authenticating private collections, told me. He’s examined quite a few newcomers himself. Who was to say Rudy hadn’t lucked out?

  Soon Rudy began to share his wealth. Not just at small dinners. Now he would sell you cases of some of his wines at the right price. He had many, and he wanted others to have the same tasting opportunity.