Getting Conned
Fancy Lying
In having been worth anything from some negative number to scores of millions of imaginary, but absolutely “real” dollars (i.e., stock), I can say with certainty that the more money you are perceived to have, or have control of, or be worth, the smarter the con artists get.
If you have not been conned by someone who thinks you are worth a great deal of money, you should put that on your bucket list. It moves fairly quickly to what I call “fancy lying.” You can’t just hide; they find you. But you can learn to enjoy it, you can also do some “fancy lying” for the enhanced conversations you can have with your fellow man as you explore the worlds of infroperty, where property becomes information and information becomes property.
A con is, of course, a lie, but as long as the liar is willing to engage in conversation, it can be fun. The fun stops when the liar cons someone else behind your back and will not have a conversation about his “thoughts”. One way the liar can get you not to question him is if you trust him. As this article correctly states.
So the most fun cons are when you agree to join his con that he is trying to pull on you. Then you can watch his nasty little mind go off thinking you are in on the con of someone else. I do not do this often, it is not a hobby, but I have been to this place a few times in my life.
So, here is how to get the conversation started with the suspected con artist. You tell him, “you know I am just worth $47 million dollars on paper, and I can’t get to that money until I am sixty, and if I die it all goes to the Catholic Church and they have the contract already. But I have a friend who is worth over $50 million in pure cash; a friend at the bank told me. I wouldn’t mind figuring out how to get some of that.”
Works every time. (You have to play with the detail here, but you make yourself out to be as “specially rich” as the con artist but similarly eager to make more. Being a King of a small country, of course, helps).
My lie is a little white lie, as long as I break off before the guy finds out who this person is. Which, in my case, is generally completely imaginary. Also, you never want to take that conversation very far. As George Kent said, to paraphrase, “When you go after corruption, you piss off corrupt people.”
When the liar is in a position to lie with confidence that you will not question his fiat lies, then even the smartest people get conned. And, by the way, unlike the person quoted above, it is not almost inevitable, it is scientifically inevitable:
