Chapter 1 - What and Why

Sonnenlieb, lawyer/salesman came up with the idea of referral sales, ended up broke

This is one example of pyramid selling, America’s top swindle

Many forms of selling and conning have been going on forever

Underneath all of them is a fundamental invariant, and it’s important to draw distinctions between swindles and sales

Chapter 2 - The General Principles of Swindling and Selling

We buy with implicit cost/ben analysis--you’ll be richer

Which implies the seller is fine losing or some third party is fine losing so the buyer can win

There’s also an implicit explanation for why the customer/mark is chosen

No conman offers something for nothing; at least they pretend there’s a trade

Conmen often see everyone as rational economic actors

So, knowing wealth cannot be created from thin air, they try to get the mark to feel as though they’re contributing heavily to the trade

Two types

One, where personal value creates value from a trade

When outsiders exist, they can be competitors as well as victims, so you must convince the buyer/mark as being needed more than others

Chapter 3 - Two-Party Playlets

The Spanish prisoner: a clear showing of something that is in every sale and swindle

A person privy of wealth but in jail

Without both together, nothing of value exists

The prisoner must show he could get the letter to someone else, but it would be quite difficult

This is a microeconomic bilateral monopoly problem

A play gets constructed

The “Psst buddy”

Someone pretends to have stolen goods and sells them cheaply relative to what they would have cost

Here, the mark is altercast as a member of a small demand group, as opposed to a monopsonist in the Spanish prisoner

Things get more interesting and effective with more people, when the boodle can be made onstage

Chapter 4 - Three-Party Plays

The big con

Rigged horse betting, getting him some money, then getting him to give more and stealing it

All starting by finding a guy’s wallet and him winning money for them as a “thank you”

One of the most powerful roles to give the customer/mark is to see through someone else’s role, thereby hiding the fact that that he’s still in the audience

There are also short cons, rigged games of chance, but quicker, and the person to be robbed is actually onstage

Chapter 6 - Bargains: Face-to-Facework

So far all cons can be understood as both parties thinking they get a bargain

The Squaresville pitch--it saying you’ll sell cheaply and also worth selling to the buyer; it’s interesting bc in a perfect market it shouldn’t exist

Have to avoid it seeming that the price difference is due to the product being different; instead, you have to demonstrate being the beneficiary of market failure

Often also, lower prices mean more units sold, mean economies of scale

Stable cost advantage and fleeting deflection have the same logical form--I have a reason why I can and must give you a bargain

Creating buyer inertia with clear discounts, physical proximity, etc. can make buyers more likely to purchase

Salesmen have an edge on sellers, for example, in driving customer inertia forward

Salesmen also can get edges by giving information that affects the seller but not the salesman in this case

They also cut along class and racial lines to cut across seller-buyer distinction