Hats off …to con artists!

I must admit it.  I adore swindlers. I wish I had a fraction of their ingenuity and finesse.

They know what bait to use to catch what fish. We may swagger around pitying the victims of fraud we read about day in and day out. We may reassure ourselves that we are not like them. We are too smart to be taken for a ride. We can see through any fraud. All I can say is that whatever pride we feel in our ability to detect fraud is most probably false pride. It is just that a really good con artist hasn’t found it worthwhile to pit their wits against ours.

I’ve already done a couple of posts on deceptive persuasion. The immediate provocation for self-flogging is an interesting post, A Speaker scam, that I read earlier today. It is by Nick Morgan, a blogger I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in improving their communication.

The swindlers’ modus operandi is beautiful. They don’t fill your inbox with inane offers and promises. They target people who speak well and would be delighted to get an invitation to speak at a prestigious University or at a big religious conference in a foreign country. Not a Third World country, certainly not Nigeria, but UK. They don’t ask you to pay anything up front. Once you accept the invitation, they say they will send you air tickets, provide you hospitality in the UK, and pay you an attractive fee for the privilege of listening to you. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain including an international feather in your cap. At least that is what you think until very late in the game.

Let me not spoil the fun by giving you a summary of Nick Morgan’s post. Read the original; it’s short. Do go on to the comments section. You will find there several readers sharing their experience of receiving such invitations. The comments are, naturally, from those who detected the scam at some point and pulled back. They talk about the kind of things that aroused their suspicion. But I will not be surprised if there are hundreds of publicity-craving professional speakers worldwide who have been so highly honoured and so deeply conned.

Have you had any such experience? How did you detect the attempted con job?