I liked the $20 bill ruse in "Paper Moon." You and your associate get in a grocery-store line separately, with a few people between you. Associate pays for a small item with a $20 bill, on which he has written something small like "Happy Birthday Sue." He leaves. When it's your turn, you pay for your items with a $5. When you get the change back, you say "Hey -- wait a minute, I gave you a 20." Cashier says "No, you gave me a 5." You say "No! I'm sure it was a 20, because my grandmother sent it to me for my birthday. In fact, it says "Happy Birthday Sue" on it. Look in your drawer!"

Of course, this is very small-time, and you need to be a cute little girl for it to work. But it's elegant.

I kinda liked the two-man scam in American Gods, for all its parallels to Christianity and the need for both sides to keep others trapped in the middle.

Check this one out:

Convince the American public that their media is liberal.

Fire all the bureaucrats who voted for the opposition, replace them with party faithful, and pretend that's the way it's always worked.

Violate the civil rights of millions, knowing it's illegal; claim immunity from the law, knowing it won't be granted; and delay until the issue fades away.

Persuade good people to believe torture is effective and isn't evil.

Pretend that lust is a worse sin than greed, pride, and vanity put together.

Whatta scam!

That's funny, it doesn't look like Metafilter... but it tastes and smells like Metafilter... ;)

Those are all nice, but I still want to hear Capn's investment advice. 7 weeks in a row can't be a mistake.

Color me clueless but what are Joe Jobs?

Joe Jobs. Not nearly as much fun as other kinds of jobs.

Also, Capn, your idea is brilliant. And for a very reasonable fee, I can sell you exactly the list of 1024 solid prospects that you want and need.

It's not my idea at all taz, I just read about it somewhere.

I am interested in your list though, and as it so happens, through another business transaction, I happen to have a large cashier's cheque drawn on a Greek bank that I can't cash here, how about if I send you the cheque, you cash it, and send me the list and wire me the difference in US funds?

I knew someone that practically made a career out of scamming chain electronics stores.

One method was to scour yard sales, swap meets, flea markets, thrift stores and pawn shops (this was pre-ebay) for fairly modern but broken electronics. Very, very cheap broken electronics, as in free or almost free.

Having a mobile phone to call up stores and ask if they had any (whatever) in stock was a major help.

Then one would go to ye olde chain electronics shop with ye liberal return policy and pay full cash for the same exact model device.

Which one would bring home and either swap out the guts and cases entirely, or just the broken part or parts. Then one would take the now "broken" but "new" device back to the store for a full refund, while keeping the "older looking" but functional device at home.

He was pretty much single-handedly responsible for some pretty drastic policy changes at a large quantity of well-known chain stores, at least locally to where he was operating.


Me? I like not paying retail, legally. I love looking for floor models, haggling over the price, and even getting the employee to put their discount on the sale atop it all, all while angling to aim for upgrades and bonuses if at all possible.


I also once lived in a house that had about a dozen stolen phone lines patched into it from the nearest trunk box. We were running a BBS, and any calls we made were toll free, so we liked to think of it as "borrowing" rather than "stealing". Though they were probably pretty annoyed at the number of data/modem calls they got on their voice lines.


My favorite, though, was leeching broadband from a campus, from way the hell off campus. Same guy from the electronics chain store scams, too. He bought something like 2,500 feet of coaxial cable and a number of amps/repeaters and then actually installed it up on telephone poles, passing through trunk and switch boxes, service tunnels and more to hook up his off-campus apartment to the school's central switching and network distribution faciliy.

It was a pro job. Anyone who knew telecom that might have inspected the untagged and unremarked cable would see the quality work, assume it was official, shrug and let it be. "If you don't know what it is, you don't unhook it! It's probably important, and breaking important stuff is BAD!" is pretty standard in telecom.

He maintained this (then) high speed link for over a year and a half.

I had a roomate who had a fake radio station. He got dozens of CDs a week and never paid to get into a concert. He said it was "cable radio" (which was a real thing) and rightly asserted that no-one would actually go through the hassle of trying to hook their stereo up to their cable box. He put out quarterly (monthly?) newsletters with a programming grid, concert reviews, etc. I bet the house where we lived still gets swag in the mail.

rightly asserted that no-one would actually go through the hassle of trying to hook their stereo up to their cable box

I did this at my parent's house. In addition to crystal clear FM radio, the cable company sent the sound channel for the music video cable station (MuchMusic, back when they used to play music videos) over too.

Why? So I could listen to MuchMusic in glorious 2 channel stereo at a time when stereo televisions were rare.

The classic in the field is David Maurer's The Big Con.

JOSEPH "Yellow Kid" WEIL (1875?-1976)is probably the single all-time great.