Scams and confidence tricks are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim is the "mark". This list should not be considered complete but covers the most common examples.
Get-rich-quick schemes Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied; these include fake franchises, real estate "sure things", get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, foreign exchange fraud, Nigerian money scams, fraudulent treasure hunts, and charms and talismans. Variations include the pyramid scheme, the Ponzi scheme, and the matrix scheme.
The "Money-Box Scheme" Victor Lustig, a con artist born in Austria-Hungary, designed and sold a "money box" which he claimed could print $100 bills using blank sheets of paper. A victim, sensing huge profits and untroubled by ethical implications, would buy the machine for a high price—from $25,000 to $102,000. Lustig stocked the machine with six to nine genuine $100 bills for demonstration purposes, but after that it produced only blank paper. By the time victims realized that they had been scammed, Lustig was long gone.
Salting Salting or "salting the mine" are terms for a scam in which gemstones or gold ore are planted in a mine or on the landscape, duping the mark into purchasing shares in a worthless or non-existent mining company.Dan Plazak A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top (Salt Lake: Univ. of Utah Press, 2006) . During gold rushes, scammers would load shotguns with gold dust and shoot into the sides of the mine to give the appearance of a rich ore, thus "salting the mine". Examples include the diamond hoax of 1872 and the Bre-X gold fraud of the mid-1990s.
This trick was featured in the HBO series Deadwood, when Al Swearengen and E. B. Farnum trick Brom Garret into believing gold is to be found on the claim Swearengen intends to sell him. This con was also featured in Sneaky Pete. In season 3 of the TV series Leverage, the team salts a mine with coltan in order to run a con on two greedy and corrupt luminaries.
Spanish Prisoner The Spanish Prisoner scam—and its modern variant, the advance-fee scam or "Nigerian letter scam"—involves enlisting the mark to aid in retrieving some stolen money from its hiding place. The victim sometimes believes they can cheat the con artists out of their money, but anyone trying this has already fallen for the essential con by believing that the money is there to steal (see also Black money scam). The classic Spanish Prisoner trick also contains an element of the romance scam (see below).
Many con artists employ extra tricks to keep the victim from going to the police. A common ploy of investment scammers is to encourage a mark to use money concealed from tax authorities. The mark cannot go to the authorities without revealing that they have committed tax fraud. Many swindles involve a minor element of crime or some other misdeed. The mark is made to think that they will gain money by helping fraudsters get huge sums out of a country (the classic advance-fee fraud/Nigerian scam); hence a mark cannot go to the police without revealing that they planned to commit a crime themselves.
In a twist on the Nigerian fraud scheme, the mark is told they are helping someone overseas collect debts from corporate clients. Large cheques stolen from businesses are mailed to the mark. These cheques are altered to reflect the mark's name, and the mark is then asked to cash them and transfer all but a percentage of the funds (their commission) to the con artist. The cheques are often completely genuine, except that the "pay to" information has been expertly changed. This exposes the mark not only to enormous debt when the bank reclaims the money from their account, but also to criminal charges for money laundering. A more modern variation is to use laser-printed counterfeit cheques with the proper bank account numbers and payer information.
This scam can be seen in the film The Spanish Prisoner.
Persuasion tricks
Persuasion fraud, when fraudsters persuade people only to target their money, is an old-fashioned type of fraud.
Grandparent scam A grandparent gets a call or e-mail from someone claiming to be their grandchild, saying that they are in trouble. For example, the scammer may claim to have been arrested and require money wired, or gift cards purchased for bail, and asks the victim not to tell the grandchild's parents, as they would "only get upset". The call is fraudulent impersonation, the name of the grandchild typically obtained from social media postings as well as obituaries listed either in newspapers or from a funeral home's website. Any money wired out of the country is gone forever.
Romance scam The traditional romance scam has now moved into Internet dating sites, gaining a new name of catfishing. The con actively cultivates a romantic relationship which often involves promises of marriage. However, after some time, it becomes evident that this Internet "sweetheart" is stuck in their home country, lacking the money to leave and therefore unable to be united with the mark. The scam then becomes an advance-fee fraud or a check fraud. A wide variety of reasons can be offered for the trickster's lack of cash, but rather than just borrow the money from the victim (advance fee fraud), the con-artist normally declares that they have checks which the victim can cash on their behalf and remit the money via a non-reversible transfer service to help facilitate the trip (check fraud). Of course, the checks are forged or stolen and the con-artist never makes the trip: the hapless victim ends up with a large debt and an aching heart. This scam can be seen in the movie Nights of Cabiria. Variants of these employ bots or even live people who offer to go to live cam sites to video chat with the mark. The sites almost always require a credit card to be entered. The scammer insists the site is free and the card is only for purposes of age verification. The scammer will aggressively push using the site instead of a more well-known service like Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp, or using more rational ways to obtain age verification (such as asking to see a driver's license or passport). Typically these sites charge a relatively low fee, often close to US$25–$50. After the fee has been paid the scammer vanishes and the site ceases to exist shortly thereafter. This is common on quick dating sites like Tinder or free ones like OkCupid, but has been seen on ones that require payment as well.
In some cases, an online dating site is itself engaged in fraud, posting profiles of fictional persons or persons which the operator knows are not currently looking for a date in the advertised locality.
Fortune-telling fraud One traditional swindle involves fortune-telling. In this scam, a fortune teller uses cold reading skills to detect that a client is genuinely troubled rather than merely seeking entertainment; or is a gambler complaining of bad luck. The fortune teller informs the mark that they are the victim of a curse, and that for a fee a spell can be cast to remove the curse. In Romany, this trick is called bujo ("bag") after one traditional format: the mark is told that the curse is in their money; they bring money in a bag to have the spell cast over it, and leaves with a bag of worthless paper.W. W. Zellner, William M. Kephart, Extraordinary groups: an examination of unconventional lifestyles (Macmillan, 2000; ), pp. 121–122 Fear of this scam has been one justification for legislation that makes fortune-telling a crime.Spiritual Psychic Science Church v. City of Azusa (1985) 39 Cal.3d 501, 217 Cal.Rptr. 225; 703 P.2d 1119 See the "Blessing Scam" below.
This scam got a new lease on life in the electronic age with the virus hoax. Fake anti-virus software falsely claims that a computer is infected with viruses, and renders the machine inoperable with bogus warnings unless blackmail is paid. In the Datalink Computer Services incident, a mark was fleeced of several million dollars by a firm that claimed that his computer was infected with viruses, and that the infection indicated an elaborate conspiracy against him on the Internet. The alleged scam lasted from August 2004 through October 2010 and is estimated to have cost the victim $6–20 million.
Gold brick scams Gold brick scams involve selling a tangible item for more than it is worth; they are named for the scam of selling the victim an allegedly golden ingot which turns out to be gold-coated lead.
Fiddle game
The fiddle game uses the pigeon drop technique. A pair of con men work together, one going into an expensive restaurant in shabby clothes, eating, and claiming to have left his wallet at home, which is nearby. As collateral, the con man leaves his only worldly possession, the violin that provides his livelihood. After he leaves, the second con man swoops in, offers an outrageously large amount (for example $50,000) for what he calls a rare instrument, then looks at his watch and runs off to an appointment, leaving his card for the mark to call him when the fiddle-owner returns. The "poor man" comes back, having gotten the money to pay for his meal and redeem his violin. The mark, thinking he has an offer on the table from the second conspirator, then buys the violin from the fiddle player who "reluctantly" agrees to sell it for a certain amount that still allows the mark to make a "profit" from the valuable violin. The result is the two con men are richer (less the cost of the violin), and the mark is left with a cheap instrument.
The fiddle game may be played with any sufficiently valuable-seeming piece of property; a common variation known as the pedigreed-dog swindle uses a mongrel dog upsold as a rare breed but is otherwise identical.
Green goods The green goods scam, also known as the "green goods game", was a scheme popular in the 19th-century United States in which people were duped into paying for worthless counterfeit money. It is a variation on the pig-in-a-poke scam using money instead of other goods like a pig. The mark would respond to flyers circulated throughout the country by the scammers ("green goods men") which claimed to offer "genuine" counterfeit currency for sale. This currency was sometimes alleged to have been printed with stolen engraving plates. Victims, usually living outside major cities, would be enticed to travel to the location of the green goods men to complete the transaction. Victims were guided by a "steerer" to be shown large amounts of genuine currency—represented to be counterfeit—which was then placed in a bag or satchel. Victims then received offers to purchase the money at a price much less than face value. While a victim negotiated a price or was otherwise distracted, another accomplice (the "ringer") would switch the bag of money for a bag containing sawdust, green paper, or other worthless items. Victims would leave unaware of the switch, and were unwilling to report the crime, as attempting to purchase counterfeit currency was itself a crime and the victim accordingly risked arrest.
Pig in a poke (cat in a bag)