(continued from: Badger Game.)
While there are some legitimate fields of study and professional practice that require modeling futures for possible scenarios and contingent strategy building there is an entire dark world industry of authors, tv shows, conventions, media and websites, hotlines, social media spaces, megachurches and other “entertainment” sources aimed at bilking every last dollar out of those who will listen.
This post will be about a very broad subset of tricks. It ranges from investor fraud to sports predictions to cold and hot spiritual reading and psychic mediums and hot readers… There are probably more I’m leaving out right now than not. Considering this, I’ve decided to write about two stand-out selections from a hoard of real-world examples
Some confidence tricks, especially long ones require that the mark believes the confidence trickster to have prior knowledge with a good track record of prediction (generally by prior experience and intuition, supernatural, or other means.) of what the outcome to a stressful, risky, or desperate situation will be. The mark in most examples shown is an investor being made to believe a broker is making all the right picks or a gambler convinced that the scammer could deduce the outcome of a sports game. Other examples of people most susceptible include those with strong beliefs in spiritual, magic, or superstitious devices. And of course, the absolutely massive number of people searching for the key to avert or get relief from some of life’s very much complicated problems like an illness or time of mourning.
One of the examples I’ve decided to include today is likely the most widely documented and damning case of a hoaxing method known as “hot reading”
In hot reading the trickster making the miraculously accurate proclamations of intimate knowledge of their mark, their mark’s family, their mark’s afflictions or needs or wants or favorite food or some other gloriously unknowable nugget of divine or otherwise psychically delivered knowledge… is just literally wearing a hidden earpiece, selecting people by name, and reiterating personal information they usually submitted themselves on the way in. In a state of celebrant ecstasy or other heightened psychosomatic response to the absolute theatrics of the spectacle before them the mark will lovingly throw their money at the possibility that the ruse is actually a dead relative, famous spirit, or even God (yeah, THE big guy folks) Speaking directly about THEM through some magnificent wonder-pony that was imbued with the Metatron-ian power.
Sadly, the most susceptible are often those who NEED something to help them through the despair of horrible illness or hardship.
The most well-known example I can think of is a man who I last noticed around 2008 or so selling bags of “miracle water” to sick and poor people over the phone for 50 bucks. That man is named Peter Popoff and in 1986 the famed “conjurer” and *tester (“Debunk” was a term Randi did not favor) of psychics, telekinesis, and other fabulous claims, James Randi, and his group CSI (no not the kind on the show) surveilled Popoff and exposed his fraud to the entire world.
(The following quoted sections in this example are from the Wikipedia entry on Popoff)
“At the height of his popularity in the 1980s, Popoff would accurately announce home addresses and specific illnesses of audience members during his "healing sermons", a feat that he implied was due to divine revelation and "God-given ability".In 1986, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry charged that Popoff was using electronic transmissions to receive his information; Popoff denied it, insisting that the messages were divinely revealed. Skeptic groups distributed pamphlets explaining how Popoff's feats could be accomplished without any sort of divine intervention. Popoff branded his critics "tools of the devil.”
Popoff wouldn’t just tell his parishioners that he knew where they lived. He would also convince them to throw their prescriptions on the stage… to give him their lifegiving treatments in exchange for his (fraudulently purported) deity bestowed healing powers. “Many would obey, tossing away bottles of digitalis, nitroglycerine, and other important maintenance medications.”
This trick continued unhindered but for accusations until James Randi, illusionist Steve Shaw, and Alexander Jason who was a professional forensic crime scene analyst and electronics expert set up surveillance to find out exactly what the hell was going on here.
“With computerized radio scanners, Jason was able to demonstrate that Popoff's wife, Elizabeth, was using a wireless radio transmitter to broadcast information that she and her aides had culled from prayer request cards filled out by audience members. Popoff received the transmissions via an earpiece he was wearing and repeated the information to astonished audience members. Jason produced video segments interspersing the intercepted radio transmissions with Popoff's "miraculous" pronouncements.-
Randi also planted accomplices in Popoff's audiences, including a man dressed as a woman whom Popoff "cured" of uterine cancer at a meeting in Detroit in 1984. Randi and Shaw recorded Elizabeth describing a woman to Popoff as "that big ni***r in the back", and warning him, "Keep your hands off those tits ... I'm watching you." At another session, Elizabeth and her aides were heard laughing uncontrollably at the physical appearance of a man suffering from advanced testicular cancer”
In 1986 James Randi released the evidence, which was later featured in a piece about critical thinking on Nova, on television live in an interview with Johnny Carson. By the next year Popoff had filed for bankruptcy in which the ministry listed well over 100 creditors and a million bucks worth of debt. All despite having been reporting an average income of $500,000 a month until then. Adjusted for inflation, that is around the equivalent of making $1,275,400 nowadays a month by selling empty space. A month. not a year. And they still claimed bankruptcy and left an army of vendors holding the check.
Now that we are clear on what hot reading is (the use of research or spoon-fed knowledge to fool someone into believing you’ve secret valuable information about them and for them) I would bet you think the next example will be about “cold reading”. Psychic mediums who play a sort of guessing game and rely heavily on ambiguous near proximity guesses that become a sort of self-fulfilling, tarot-like, fortune telling exercise as soon as the reader has the mark believing that they are indeed repeating details only a dead loved one or some other spirit could know about them.
In fact, cold reading has nothing to do with what I am about to share here, but the illusionist and debunker who is famous for his easy explanatory parable of the next example I will write about, Derren Brown, did an excellent job at demonstrating cold reading right here at this link.
This next trick is a little mathematics heavy and requires a bit of set up. In this form it takes place with mail, though there are technical examples of division and disinformation campaigns (purporting to have inside info, the truth, or simply walling off a mark for targeting) on social media which have similar aspects and rely on exploited 3rd party apps and at times misuse of professional tools granted to shills. We will keep this example limited to a trick known as “The Baltimore Stockbroker”
The trick requires targeting large groups of people and then dividing them and ascertaining that you know how something will turn out, giving each group a different answer, and then repeating the practice again and again with the group until a decent number of “investors” or “gamblers” is in the group that has seen an accurate enough prediction, time and time again, to invest their own money and belief in the chicanery being played out before them.
The parable that Brown told in 2008, probably the best explainer you’ll ever hear about this trick, is beautifully simple.
It’s posted here and goes like this:
“Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
Suppose you received a letter (or more likely nowadays a text message or email) from a stockbroker who told you a certain stock was going up over the next several weeks. You watched the stock, and sure enough it went up. A few weeks later that same stockbroker sent another letter to say another stock was going to go down over the following few weeks. Sure enough, as you watched, the stock did go down.
Then that same stockbroker sent a third letter to tell you to watch another stock that was going to go up. Sure enough it did. With the next letter the stockbroker told you to watch another stock that was going to go up. And sure enough it did. That same stockbroker sent another six letters each time predicting correctly the direction of every stock he told you to watch – a perfect prediction ten out of ten times. In the eleventh letter he asked for a big investment. What would you say? He had been right ten out of ten times.
What the investor does not see is the total picture. What was happening from the stockbroker’s point of view?
The stockbroker initially sent 10,240 letters. In 5,120 he predicted the stock would go up; in the other 5,120 he predicted the stock would go down.
The 5,120 to whom he sent the letter saying the stock would go down never heard from our stockbroker again. Of the 5,120 to whom he said the stock would go up, 2,560 got a second letter predicting that second stock would go up and the other 2,560 got a second letter saying the second stock would go down. You get the picture now.
Only 10 prospects would get letters with 10 perfect predictions. The other 10,230 people never heard from the stockbroker ever again.”
_____________
By the end of this exercise the 10 marks are so confident that the broker is really on to something it’s kind of easy to see how someone could fall for this sort of flim-flam and it’s a stark reminder of how far an individual or group might actually go to separate their mark from their money or gain believers which may then vouch for them to other marks, boost their brand, or spread word of their (sarcastic air quotes) “uncanny abilities of perfect foresight”.