I love a good, clean hustle, the kind where you don’t even know you’ve just been fleeced, and when you finally do figure it out, it’s too damn late. The Trojan Horse was a good hustle: “Oh look… someone’s given us this big, beautiful wooden horse for no apparent reason! Let’s wheel this sucker on in here and then go to sleep.”
Or the old Irish Tinker driveway paving scam: By the time your driveway melts down into the street, they’re three states away and your check has been cashed. And Bernie Madoff whipped up quite an excellent hustle on people who ought to have known better… but didn’t, not when greed got the best of them. All good hustles play on the greed of the mark. It makes them weak. Vanity works too. The thing about being scammed, though, is that once you do figure it out, it should never happen to you again. In admitting his Ponzi, Madoff exposed several other hucksters pulling the same caper, though not in such grand style. If a man with a brogue accent ever destroys your driveway, you’ll be wise the next time.
And the Trojans made an aphorism out of their fateful bout of naivete: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. But the hustles will always live on, I guess, because PT Barnum had it wrong: There are hundreds of suckers born every minute, and a lot of them have settled around here. Some of them have even managed to get themselves elected to public office. And here’s what I think: I think word is out among the hustling class that the North Carolina Piedmont Triad is full of fish, just unassumingly swimming around with too much cash in their pockets. We are marked. That’s why they call us “marks.” Because of this, I offer a short primer on a few well-known hustles that have been around for decades — some have even been in use since the Middle Ages — but which people still fall for all the time. To qualify as a hustle, a transaction needs only three things: a mark, a perpetrator and a one-sided payoff. The fake auction: Here’s an old-school hustle used to inflate the price of an item by exaggerating the demand for it. Take a “valuable” object like a diamond ring, a baseball card or… oh, I don’t know… a commitment to build a computer assembly plant that could create 1,500 jobs. Really, only the mark is interested in the “valuable” object, but by creating the illusion that others may also want in, the mark is forced to commit a lot more money than he initially bargained for. Sound familiar? It should: It’s the method Dell used when procuring $280 million in incentives from the city of Winston-Salem, Forsyth County and the state of North Carolina in 2004.
The Pigeon Drop: The Pigeon Drop is one of the oldest and most basic scams out there, and it’s so easy a child could do it — actually, it works better if a child does it! The con involves one mark and at least one sharpie, and the payoff is either a real or theoretical pile of money that exists at the end of the rainbow. All the hustler has to do is convince the mark to put up some “good faith” money — which the hustler will match, of course — and then everyone can share in these future profits. If done properly, the money has disappeared minutes after the mark has given it up. I think of the pigeon drop every time I see that husk of a baseball stadium near downtown Winston-Salem, which has been approved for $37 million in tax incentives from the city and county.
The Carny Scam: Named for the shady games of chance utilized by traveling carnivals, the Carny Scam denotes any con based on a virtually unwinnable game, like an impossible ring toss or a balloon dart game with dull darts and half-filled balloons. Or, you know, a lottery. The Reload: The Reload is based on the principle of throwing good money after bad — never a good idea, but you’d be surprised how many people do it, especially after they’ve thrown away an awful lot of “bad” money. It’s the way a lot of internet scam artists work, first stinging their marks with a variation on the Spanish Prisoner ruse, AKA the Nigerian Scam. Hustlers entice the marks to send one check after another, each supposedly contributing toward the attainment of some goal like a stake in a lost Iraqi fortune, a wealthy and/or beautiful mailorder bride or maybe even an regional distribution hub and attendant ground transport center for a huge overnight delivery concern. FedEx, by the way, first singled out the Piedmont Triad International Airport in 1998, 11 years ago, for its regional hub. It was initially slated to go fully online in 2003. There are more scams, of course: the Pig in a Poke, the Honeytrap, the Wire Game, the Melon Drop, the Gas Can… but if you can’t spot a Trojan Horse, you’ll never see the Honeytrap coming.
