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A scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity , naivety , compassion , vanity , confidence , irresponsibility , and greed .
Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim is the "mark". Particular scams are mainly directed toward elderly people, as they may be gullible and sometimes inexperienced or insecure, especially when the scam involves modern technology such as computers and ...
Hidden messages distributed, according to a certain rule or key, as smaller parts (e.g. words or letters) among other words of a less suspicious cover text. This particular form of steganography is called a null cipher. Messages written in Morse code on yarn and then knitted into a piece of clothing worn by a courier. [1]
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A variant called the "fawney rig" or "ring drop" dates to at least the 1780s in England but has continued to crop up around the world as recently as the 2010s. [ 6 ] [ 10 ] In this basic version of the pigeon drop, a lone con artist pretends to find a ring on the sidewalk in view of the mark, possibly in a purse with a jeweler's receipt proving ...
A romance scam is a confidence trick involving feigning romantic intentions towards a victim, gaining the victim's affection, and then using that goodwill to get the victim to send money to the scammer under false pretenses or to commit fraud against the victim.
Three-card monte – also known as find the lady and three-card trick – is a confidence game in which the victims, or "marks", are tricked into betting a sum of money, on the assumption that they can find the "money card" among three face-down playing cards. It is very similar to the shell game except that cards are used instead of shells. [1]
The drop swindle was a confidence trick commonly used during the 19th and 20th centuries. Employing a variety of techniques the con usually consists of the "dropper", who purposely drops a wallet containing counterfeit money near a potential victim.