Are There Any Really Good Scams Left Out There ?

Dude, I’m tellin’ ya………….

As the story continues to unfold about the jackass out in Colorado who (at this point) seems to have definitley staged his balloon taking off with his young son allegedly on-board, it put me to thinking.

I’m a guy that loves a good scam. I’ve participated in a number of them. Mostly as the perpetrator. And I have to admit, once or twice as the victim. My buddy and I were out in Vegas for a convention and some marketing company had a bunch of material printed up that looked exactly like $100 bills. We found ourselves at a wild party in a top floor suite at the Venetian. There was a mass humanity of people in the room and lots of crazy, loud entertainment going on. Bathtubs full of booze, etc.

Someone approached me and asked if I had $20’s in exchange for a hundred so he could “tip the bartender”. The bill looked extremely legit. I made the change for him and he disappeared into the sea of people. I noticed very quickly afterward that it was a fragazzi. I tried to hunt the guy down and was going to strangle him. Literally. But he was gone and I was out $100. My friend and I subsequently learned that more than a handful of people at the party got taken the same way.

I got over it by realizing that after having played so many others over the years for a lot more than $100, I finally got played myself. I tip my hat to that SOB. He got me. And I do appreciate a good scam.

But one of the things that amuses me is how it seems like every possible scam there is has been done already. I often tell friends when we’re discussing something like the Colorado balloon hoax that, “If there is a way on this Earth for man to make money….he has thought of it.”

Perhaps the masters of the craft are the mafia/syndicate. Many people think the mob has been crippled in recent years, but even if they are down to controlling the video poker machines in pubs and taverns, believe me—organized crime still has its hand in the cookie jar. I used to enjoy the scams they performed on The Sopranos. The “no-show” and the  “no-work” jobs they dished out after landing a construction contract. I had a few of those over the years. They weren’t in construction and they weren’t always me being part of a scam.

They were just situations where an office was shutting down or a company was going out of business and there simply wasn’t any work to be done. I remember one that my buddy and I had. We’d show up at 8:30 in the morning with our thick novels in-hand. We’d shoot the shit for a while, surf the net and read our books, and then take a nice long lunch. We’d go back to the office and read until the end of the day and go home. Nice.

But getting back to the scams. I do believe we have thought of everything. There’s the well-known and celebrated scams like counting cards in Vegas or using loaded dice. And everyone fears being the next victim of identity theft. You could say that I was a victim of one of the oldest scams out there: counterfeiting. I got fooled by a counterfeit $100 bill. But the first guy to try and pass fake coins probably traces back to ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt. By the time of the Romans, it was “old hat” already.

Anybody ever play a game of 3 card monty?

Or just been the victim of a quick-change artist at their job? I was warned of them on my first day as a gas station cashier. And within a week, some guy tried to play me. But I simply followed the instructions I was given to leave the bill that I was given OUT of the register until the transaction was completely finished. Then they can’t tell you they gave you a $20 and you only gave change back for a $10. My guy tried the other option. He tried to have me give him change for a $20 just in general. Then he took some of that and wanted me to break it down further. I performed both requests for him. Then he tried to ask for a third exchange and I sent him on his way. He made a nice try though, God Bless him.

Since I’ve been out of work, I have donated plasma a few times for extra money. I was amused to see how stringent a system they have just to make sure you haven’t been to another facility recently. They have a number of checks-and-balances in place to make sure somebody isn’t going from donation center to donation center and donating 5 or 6 times per week. And obviously those tracers are in place because that’s exactly what people have tried to do!

I love that.

Whether somebody’s drugging racehorses, producing and selling fake jeans or watches, or bootlegging DVD movies on the street, I really think every trick in the book has been done.

I knew a guy in college who ran a weekly NFL football pool. It was the type where you place confidence points on the teams you like. Somehow or another, somebody in the pool that nobody else knew won it every single week. Not the same name, mind you. A different name every week……just a name nobody seemed to have a class with or know personally. As a dedicated scammer at that point, I approached the guy on this weird situation. He ‘fessed up on what he was doing and guess who won the pool a few times after that ? A guy that only I and my football buddy knew. And lo and behold, that generous guy gave the money to me! Nice.

One of my favorite scams is the one in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Classic. I’m talking about the scam where Clint Eastwood was partnered up with a real scumbag that every town was offering a reward for. Clint would bring the guy in to town and collect the reward. The villain would curse Clint out and vow to kill him if he ever got away. The next day when the town was ready to hang the villain, Clint would shoot down the hangman’s noose and send all the townspeople scattering. The villain would escape and he and Clint would split the reward money. Hilarious.

I like the ones where people reproduce masterpiece works of art and some rich asshole spends a fortune on it thinking it’s legit. Funny stuff.

So if you know of any really good scams that haven’t been done yet, let me know. Balloon boy out in Colorado wasn’t careful enough and now he’s been caught. But I’m always on the lookout for a great scam. Not to play them on somebody—-only to avoid being a victim of it myself. Wink wink.