Definition of monte
1: a card game in which players select any two of four cards turned face up in a layout and bet that one of them will be matched before the other as cards are dealt one at a time from the pack
— called also monte bank
Merriam Webster Dictionary.
A “shell game” is generally performed as a form of voluntary public performance with the right foreknowledge and maybe a bit of sleight-of-hand and a shill or two, onlookers are taken in and so donate their time and suspension of disbelief and also many of them their money, be it donations or gambled losses.
"You can't win, you won't win, you will never win, so don't play the game," said Wallace L. Ford 2d, Commissioner of New York City's Department of Business Services of the 3-card monte dealers who in the years leading to 1992 had been plaguing the city and even threatened the unarmed Business Improvement District security officers who voluntarily kept watch and stopped the games.
[3-Card Monte: It's Just a Shell Game, Officials Warn - The New York Times (nytimes.com)]
“The shills, often dressed in business suits or posing as tourists, are allowed to win a few rounds, enticing onlookers to play, he said. If lookouts see police officers on the horizon, the dealers swiftly pack up before they can be arrested for illegal gambling.”
“In its full form, Three-card Monte is an example of a classic "short con" in which a shill pretends to conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer, while in fact doing the reverse. The mark has no chance whatsoever of winning, at any point in the game. In fact, anyone who is observed winning anything in the game can be presumed to be a shill.”
[Three-card Monte - Wikipedia]
More than anything the monte isn’t just a good practical joke. To organize more than one person to conspire against the public and never let them in on the joke would be sociopathic. Though most anyone who prides themselves on the ability to connive others out of time or money definitely have their own broad base of issues, organized efforts are most often just lucrative in some form. Not usually wealth building and there are plenty of volunteers, some groups call those “useful idiots” and other phrasing this series will delve into.
Of the shell game and the short con":
“The shell game (also known as thimblerig, three shells and a pea, the old army game) is often portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is almost always a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud. In confidence trick slang, this swindle is referred to as a short-con”
[Shell game - Wikipedia]
You may make some parallels in more modern subjects and topics going forward that I am going to try to lay out as non-controversially and easily as possible for every *non malign reader.
In this series I am going to try to explain in simple sourced terms how various social targeting campaigns from campaign solutions to reputation protection firms generally operate, how their agents approach and what they look like from a non-funded user perspective (you may be surprised), what recruiting funnels look like from a user perspective, how blocklists are used to evade detection and scrutiny, the resurrection of an account that belonged to a user that no longer is with us and a variety of other high-tech subjects from the perspective of a discrepancy checker and researcher that got mistaken for somebody else.
I’ve been looking forward to this and I hope you do too. Respectfully yours,
-Ted MD
Dumb