The Art of the Steal (15 page)

IF IT AIN’T BROKE . . .

Some of these scams have been practiced practically from time immemorial, while others are new inventions. But many of the oldest and most clearly defined ones have a lot of vitality left in them and are more popular today than ever. One way criminals look at it is, the more tried and tested the scam, the better. If a scam has worked for decades, it’s almost like it comes with a warranty. There are literally thousands of different scams out there, of varying complexity, but let’s take a look at some of the more prevalent ones, and see how you can guard against being hoodwinked by them.

One of the oldest scams around is still going strong, and that’s the short-change scam. It’s a classic. Deftly performed, it can be deadly. Back in the old days, I used it myself on more than a few occasions. Just about any con artist who’s had any success is pretty proficient as a short-change artist, and practitioners show up in abundance at all major public events. Hundreds of short-change artists worked the recent Summer Olympics in Australia and took away plenty of gold.

Here’s a simple version of how this persistent scam operates. I go into a deli and pick up a can of soda and a bag of chips. At the register, I pay for it and collect my change. I’m about to leave when I turn back to the clerk and say, “Oh, by the way, can you break a twenty for me?”

“Sure, no problem,” he says.

The clerk hands me a ten, a five, and five ones.

I examine the bills in my hand, and say, “Actually, I didn’t want all this change, could I trouble you for a ten for this five and five ones?”

“Certainly.”

While he’s fishing in the drawer, I keep up a patter of idle conversation. When you’re pulling a scam, inane conversation is your best accomplice, because it distracts someone from concentrating on what he’s supposed to be doing.

The clerk gives me a ten and I hand over my bills and say, “You might want to count that, just to make sure that I gave you the right change.”

The clerk proceeds to count the money and discovers that I gave him a five and four ones. He tells me, “I’m sorry, sir, there’s only nine dollars here.”

I say, “Let me tell you what, so we don’t get confused let me just get my twenty back. You have nine dollars, here’s one more to make ten and here’s ten to make twenty.”

“Fair enough,” the clerk says. “Thanks much.”

What’s wrong with this little scenario? I just short-changed that clerk out of ten dollars. Add it up. I gave him twenty. He gave me twenty in change. We’re even. I gave him nine dollars. That means I’ve got twenty-one and he has twenty-nine. Then I take my twenty back and hand him eleven. I’m left with thirty and the clerk has twenty, giving me a net gain of ten. It’s a quick little profit that can be duplicated over and over again at store after store. If I had started out by giving the clerk fifty, he would have been short twenty dollars. If he had been given a hundred, he would have been out forty.

WHAT TO DO

To protect yourself from being short-changed, the important thing is to never do more than one transaction at the same time. Always complete one transaction before you begin the next one. Short-change artists try to confuse you with two transactions at once, change for a twenty and change for a ten. If you’re confused, you can rest assured that the short-change artist has it perfectly clear in his head what’s going on. And never make change until you have the full amount in your hand.

When someone starts talking to you while you’re handling money, ignore them and focus on the exchange at hand. A good short-change artist is like a magician; a moment’s lapse in concentration and you’ll be had. Johnny Carson once invited me onto the “Tonight Show” and dared me to fool him while he was fully expecting to be scammed. I had no problem shortchanging Johnny out of twenty dollars twice in five minutes. The audience loved it.

One final note. The short-change artist can be on either side of the counter. It can be the cashier short-changing the customer, or it can be the customer short-changing the cashier.

PHONE FOOLERY

I don’t know how con artists made ends meet before the invention of the telephone, because for a long time, the telephone has been a con artist’s handiest weapon. You can make a lot more with a phone than you can with a gun, and it doesn’t require a mask. Phone scams exist in all shapes and forms.

The ringing pay phone is one of the most common. You’re in Grand Central terminal, and you need to make a pay phone call. When you get to a bank of phones, one of them starts ringing. You pick it up, and say, “Hello?” There’s no one there, so you hang up, then pick up the receiver again to make the call.

Guess what? If you didn’t hang up for thirty seconds (as opposed to just five or ten seconds on a home phone), there’s still someone on the other end, and not who you’d like it to be. When you dial your number and your credit card, someone has a tape recorder on the other end and is recording those beeps. A criminal can very easily translate them into your credit card number.

When I hear a ringing pay phone, I pick it up, hang it up, then go use another phone.

There are a whole host of variations on the call-back scam like that first one I told you about that exhausted the Yellow Pages. One that regularly shows up in people’s e-mails and on their answering machines involves a message to immediately call a certain number beginning with the area code 809. The reason why will vary, but it will be something designed to get your attention: a relative is very ill, a friend has been arrested, you’ve won a vacation in Tahiti. With all the new area codes these days, most people don’t get hung up on the unrecognizable code but go right ahead and place the call. You’ll either get a lengthy recorded message or someone will do their best to keep you on the line as long as possible. Meanwhile, a huge charge is being run up on your phone bill, a bill that can run into the hundreds and even thousands of dollars. I’ve heard of people getting bills in excess of twenty-five thousand dollars.

Here’s what’s actually going on. The 809 area code is located in the British Virgin Islands. It’s a “pay-per-call” number, similar to 900 numbers in the United States. But since it’s not located in the United States, the number isn’t covered by American regulations of 900 numbers that stipulate that you must be notified and warned of all charges. There is also no requirement that the company offer a time period during which you can hang up without being charged. And, unlike with 900 numbers, you can’t put a block on your phone to avoid these calls.

The whole thing is such an obvious rip-off, and you’ve done nothing wrong. But trying to fight those charges can be nearly impossible. After all, you did make the call. Your local or long distance carrier will not be much help. They’ll probably tell you they are simply providing the billing for the foreign company. That leaves you with a foreign company that will argue that it has done nothing wrong, either. So the solution is, beware of calling a number that you don’t recognize, particularly one with an unfamiliar area code. By calling the operator, you can quickly determine precisely where that area code is.

Then there are the scams that combine the phone and the credit card. A guy calls you up on the phone: “Mrs. Jones, I’m delighted to inform you that you’ve just won a brand-new, nineteen-inch color Sony TV.”

“Oh yeah, what’s the catch?”

“No catch at all. Nothing to sign, nothing to buy. We simply ask you to pay freight and we’ll ship it to you today.”

“Oh yeah, how much is that?”

“It’s just nineteen dollars. And you can put it on your credit card.”

“Okay, great. Let me get my card and give you the number.”

Mrs. Jones’s TV is not on the way. But her credit is on the way out the door. Never give information over the phone to someone you don’t know. If an offer sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

The same thing goes for advertisements. A man was arrested in Florida and found to be bilking consumers in thirty-four states. His con was simple and straightforward. He ran ads in magazines that promised to send people a Visa card or a MasterCard with a $10,000 limit. There would be no credit check, and no questions asked. All that was required was a fee of $32.95. People sent their money and heard nothing. Sure there were no questions, but there was also no card. The con artist did see fit to send some of the respondents a generic list of banks that issued credit cards. In many of the cases, the victims simply swallowed the loss and never even reported the crime to the police. That was good for the perpetrator. By the time he was caught, he had bilked more than five thousand people.

A man in Kentucky pulled a similar scam. He set up a website that offered to provide credit cards for people with bad credit histories for $99. The site was called Credit One Financial. Payments were to be made to Capital One Financial, which sounded similar to but was unrelated to Capital One Bank. The man collected $200,000 in six weeks before he was caught.

FORGET THE FREE LUNCH

Unsolicited business opportunities that promise fat rewards for the most prosaic efforts are always something to steer clear of, and there are many variations that use the same basic technique. The solicitations are unfailingly tantalizing: earn one hundred fifty dollars a day or earn one thousand dollars a day by starting your own business. You don’t need any employees, you don’t have to have any meetings, you don’t even have to do any selling. Someone else will do all the work. Oh, sure.

These offers are always very long on promises and very short on details. And that’s the tip-off that they will lead to nothing but misery for you. One of the most common scams of this variety is the envelope-stuffing scam. “Earn two dollars every time you fold a brochure and seal it in an envelope,” is the come-on. You’d be surprised how many people are tempted by it. Of course, there is a small fee of thirty-five dollars or fifty dollars that you’ll have to pay to get started in the envelope-stuffing business. Not to worry. You’ll recoup your investment in no time at all.

I’d recommend the work myself, if it were only for real. Often, you get nothing back at all for your money, except a tax write-off. Or you’re actually told how to set up a bulk-mailing operation and begin stuffing envelopes. But the organizer refuses to pay you. He claims that your work just wasn’t up to their high-quality standards. Sometimes, the con artist does nothing more than send you instructions on how to send the envelope-stuffing ad in bulk mailings of your own. In other words, he’s turning you into an accomplice. If you ever do earn any money, it will be from others who fall for the same trap.

There are similar craft assembly scams, but no matter how exquisitely you assemble the crafts, the promoter always finds something lacking in them. And there’s also a scam where you’re invited to staple books. The trouble is, there are heavy duty machines to do that, not individuals. Keep in mind, there are very few effortless roads to riches.

Charity ruses are extremely popular as well, because people let their guard down when they hear a sob story. Recently the FTC took action against a company called Handicapped Industries that was selling products at steep prices—light bulbs, for instance, at ten times normal prices—and making the sales because its telemarketers told people that all of the workers were handicapped. They weren’t. In settling the FTC case, the company agreed to stop misrepresenting its staff.

In a 1995 study, the FTC found that 10 percent of the money donated to charity that year was misused or given to fraudulent organizations. So don’t believe what you hear. When in doubt, always ask for written information about the charity. Any legitimate one will be glad to send you material. Also, be careful of similar-sounding names, because lots of phony charities use names that sound or look like legitimate ones but one letter in the name may be different. The local Better Business Bureau or the state regulatory agency can tell you if a charity is for real.

STREET SMARTS

Many scams are executed by invisible thieves, scams that require no acting skills. But there is a whole repertoire of street scams that get pulled on the unsuspecting. One of the all-time classics is the Mustard Squirter.

A man comes up to you and says, “Do you know you have mustard all over your back?”

Startled, you glance over your shoulder, and say, “No, I had no idea.”

“I’ve got some tissues,” the man says. “Let me wipe it off.”

He proceeds to blot out the stain with tissues.

“Great,” you say. “Thanks so much, I’ve got a business meeting in an hour.”

“You’re welcome,” he says. “I think it’s all gone now.”

“Thanks again.”

You were just a victim of a mustard squirter. Before you were aware of him, the con artist squirted some mustard on your back. It doesn’t have to be mustard. It could be ketchup, chocolate, or lotion. In any case, it was a distraction. While he wiped it off, he picked your pocket, or an accomplice working with him did the theft. It happens a lot in crowded areas. Be suspicious of any good samaritan. If someone offers to wipe off some mustard, hold on to your wallet while he does it.

Then there’s the well-worn Jamaican Switch. The con artist, generally a foreigner, approaches you on the street and confides that he just arrived and has all his money in this package he’s carrying, most of which he plans to give away to the church. He opens it and shows you a thick wad of bills. He says he has no bank account or anything, and is worried about the money being stolen from him. He wonders if there is some way you could deposit it for him in your account until he makes arrangements. He’ll even pay you a fee when he picks it up. If you agree, he makes one more condition. He’d like you to give him some good faith money to prove you can be trusted. Once you do, he hands over the package and quickly leaves. The package, however, no longer contains money, but rolled-up paper.

A very popular stunt at tourist destinations is the camera scam. You’re strolling with your spouse, with your camera dangling around your neck. A friendly guy, looking like he’s having a good time himself, approaches you and asks, “Would you like me to get a picture of you?”