“I Grift” was Homer’s license plate in one Simpsons episode where he and Bart would make a living as con artists. And while there are many movies on the subject (perhaps most notably the excellent Redford / Newman film “The Sting” ) it’s still an interesting piece both of pop culture and real criminal statistics.

One interesting scheme for example is the “Football Picks Scam”. Basically the conartist will take a group of people, say 100, and tell 50 of them that one team will win, and the other 50 that the other team will win. The 50 “winners” are split again in two groups of 25. And so forth until a small group of people is left that has received a series of accurate predictions on football matches. At some point the con artists start to demand money for their services.

(By the way: One can even offer a 100% money-back guarantee on this one. The loosers will get their cash back while the winners paid you for guessing. Also kind of related: Google uses - if I’m correctly informed - such a split population technique to research new features. Let’s say 50% of users get a new feature in variant A, other 50% in variant B. By usage numbers Google can estimate the better solution.)

Another popular scam is when an unsuspicious looking, well-dressed man is standing at a filling station and telling people that he needs 20 Euros or so for gas. This involves some story about a lost wallet. He looks trustworthy and he promises to pay you back and asks for your contact information. Obviously you’ll never hear from him again. I have personally encountered such a person here in Germany at a highway rest-area.

Finally, at least for this article, there’s romance scams. Where people using online dating sites are made to believe that someone in another country is in love with them but cannot afford the flight ticket to meet.  Obviously some victims will pay. And if you ask me, they deserved to be robbed.

But some of the schemes are quite clever and - because we live in the future - there’s already an excellent Wikipedia article listing quite a few of them.

Enjoy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks

To conclude I might add that there are other Get Rich Quick Schemes that are not illegal (in some countries at least). One of them became quite popular when an Austrian man put up his house as a price in a lottery.


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