On 12/17/2009 10:10 PM, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:
I disagree. I think Steorn would have to convince a LOT of people in order to pull it off, but in the end it would still fail - they will still be tarred and feathered. It's my understanding that most con jobs are done with as little publicity as possible since con artists typically go after the ignorant and uneducated, and the best way to accomplish that is to operate as discretely as possible - preferably from Nigeria! ;-) I realize some might point to Madoff as an example of a high profile successful con job. But again I disagree. I realize many people got bilked out of billions of dollars, but eventually, Madoff didn't succeed, and where is he now.
Wait -- Madoff is held up as an example of a high profile con job that shows the sort of things a con artist will attempt.
He's held up as an example of how you can get staff members to go along and do the heavy lifting to make the con work.
But he's **NOT** held up as an example of a "successful" con artist, because he (a) had no exit strategy, (b) was running a con for which no conceivable exit strategy existed which could have covered all the people involved in it, and (c) was running a con which was absolutely guaranteed to collapse, as a result of which it absolutely required an exit strategy (but see (a) and (b)).
In other words, far from being successful, his was a con whose failure was absolutely assured.
And as such it provides an existence proof for people who are intelligent, dishonest, and yet are also fools, all at the same time.
Any reasoning which goes, "Joe can't be conning us, because if he is, he's sure to get in trouble eventually, and he knows it, so he wouldn't do that..." is proven to be false by the existence of the Madoff gang.
By the standards of normal humans, who are by and large honest most of the time and more or less law abiding, professional criminals are insane. When trying to understand con artists, this is a good thing to keep in mind.
