The Confidence Game

by Maria Konnikova

  Familiarity, too, can be faked, so that trust and affection—and thus, a con’s successful progression—follow smoothly in its wake. In April 2005, Tom Jagatic and his colleagues at Indiana State University set out to gauge who might be vulnerable to phishing attacks, or attempts to gain sensitive personal information from someone by posing as a legitimate third party, like a bank or phone company. Their targets: students at their own university. Their aim was to find out what it would take to get someone to trust you and open up.

  First, they looked at publicly available information on social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster (2005, remember), and LiveJournal’s Friend of a Friend project. Next they sent their victims an e-mail that seemed to come from one of their friends at the university. When they clicked on the provided link, though, it brought them to a Web site that was clearly not affiliated with ISU, but that still asked them for their university login credentials.

  An attack was considered a “success” if someone clicked on an e-mail link and proceeded to enter their university username and password. Over 70 percent of the students entered their login information. It had, after all, come from a friend. It was, in other words, nice and . . . familiar.

  It’s not just typical college students. In an earlier study on West Point cadets, four out of five students followed a fictitious embedded link from a “colonel” who didn’t actually exist, to view their grade reports.

  One of Fred Demara’s preferred tactics on his many impostor adventures was something he termed “papering.” Before he made a request for someone’s credentials, in the run-up to assuming their identity, he would “paper” the trail with letters, calls, and conversations, posing as various people with a tie to his assumed identity who were all reaching out to the institution in question with queries and spontaneous-seeming recommendations. That way, by the time the request came around, he was a familiar presence. People were expecting him, he seemed more trustworthy, and thus he became much more successful at attaining the precise certification he needed. His “friends” were only too happy to help.

  With time, he could also rely on some “extras” who made the job all the simpler—people who had, over the years, met him, been taken in, and remained willing to vouch for him, certain that this time would be different and would mark his return to legitimacy. Indeed, many times he convinced Robert Crichton that he’d gone straight—for real and for good, this time—forcing Crichton to play an inadvertent shill in the papering game. “I have been really trying to get a job!” he wrote in one letter, in November 1960. And of course, after their deep relationship, he’d given Crichton as a reference. Would Crichton oblige? “If they write to you please give me a real good buildup and sign any name that strikes your fancy . . . on good stationery natch.”

  Whether in the world of college or business, virtual or physical, the most effective way of creating an illusion of familiarity, to lull the mark into revealing ever more about himself and thus make the put-up that much more successful, remains the same: personal contact. Moran Cerf, now a neuroscientist, used to work as a hacker of sorts: a member of a team that helped companies determine their security vulnerabilities. The most important part of the job, he told me, is to first gather the human intelligence, or HumInt—no technical skills as such; merely skills at reading people and latching on to what they’ve already shared freely, albeit, at times, unwittingly. The more specific the information, the better and more believable it would be.

  Even though the attack itself was technical, the put-up remained supremely human. One woman on their team had no real technical savvy. Instead, her unique role was as head of the HumInt effort. She’d make friends. Check schedules. Research locations. Gain trust. And then the team could commence their hacking efforts. All they needed, Cerf says, was one single entry point.

  And gaining a single entry point is quite simple if you know what you’re doing. For instance, just having a brief conversation with someone, however meaningless—a simple exchange of hellos—is enough to gain their trust later on. The person you spoke with feels more familiar and thus more friendly—so you become more likely to trust her later on. In one study, seeing someone once, however briefly, even with no further interaction, made people more likely to agree to something later asked of them—just what Cerf’s teammate was angling for. You’re no longer a stranger; you’re that girl who had coffee at my favorite coffee place just down the street from the office. What a coincidence. Of course I’ll help.

  Cerf’s accomplice was a researcher who would report back on her findings rather than use them for nefarious purposes, but she did precisely what the confidence man does each time he begins the put-up: profile the likely candidates to target, and then use that profile to ingratiate herself before she’s made a single demand. The ease with which she was able to succeed should frighten us.

  It’s an effect that can be achieved with even less of an effort than a casual chat over coffee. In the winter of 1967, Robert Zajonc (pronounced ZYE-unts), a social psychologist at Stanford University, came across an intriguing story from a Corvallis, Oregon, newspaper. For two months, the article said, a mysterious figure had been attending a course at Oregon State University, called Speech 113: Basic Persuasion. The figure had an odd appearance: it was draped entirely in a black bag. The only visible part of his—or maybe it was a her?—body was the feet. They were bare. Each class, the hooded figure sat, silently, on a table in the back of the room. The professor, Charles Goetzinger, was the only one who knew its identity. The students, meanwhile, referred to the presence as the Black Bag.

  But, strange as it was, that wasn’t what intrigued Zajonc about the story. Instead, he found himself drawn to Goetzinger’s description of the students’ reactions to the Black Bag. They had changed, according to the professor, “from hostility to the Black Bag to curiosity and finally to friendship.” The Black Bag hadn’t done anything, said a single word, or interacted with a single student. But their views of him changed all the same. Could it be, Zajonc wondered, that they’d gotten used to his presence (it was a he, after all)—and did that mere fact make them somehow friendlier toward him?

  It wasn’t a new idea. In 1903, Max Meyer had played Oriental music to his students repeatedly, from twelve to fifteen times. The more they heard it, the more they liked it. The effect was later replicated for classical music, unusual combination in colors in art, and even seats in a classroom. (Ever wonder why people usually stick to the same seat, even if there’s no assigned seating?) It’s a matter of things “growing on you.” But these were all consciously retained. What Zajonc was interested in was that word “mere”: could exposure without conscious processing accomplish the same thing?

  In 1968, Zajonc published the results of his research—results that are, perhaps, one of the most important insights that advertisers, marketers, and their less scrupulous colleagues in the con have taken to heart in executing the put-up. First he showed people series of images—Turkish nonsense words, Chinese-like characters, or photographs, depending on the study. Then he tested their liking for them. The more times they had seen them, he found, the more they liked them. He later reproduced the effect with random shapes projected onto a screen that appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was difficult to tell what exactly was being shown and, crucially, how many times it had appeared. Over and over, people chose the shapes they had seen earlier as more pleasing—even though they had no conscious memory of ever having seen them and couldn’t distinguish old from new at above-chance levels. Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect: familiarity breeds affection. And affection is a fount of the personal information so essential to the successful put-up.

  Mere exposure has real evolutionary value. If we’ve seen something before, and it didn’t kill us, well, our chances are probably better than with something we can’t predict. The better-the-devil-you-know type of reasoning. Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel-winning ethologist, showed that a raven would react with an immediate escape re
sponse in the presence of any new object, be it a camera, a stuffed polecat, or anything else. But after a few hours and repeated exposure, the bird began to approach. Infants do the same thing. In one early study, babies cried when they heard a new sound for the first time. By the fourth time, they were more curious than anything else. Alas, like many normally adaptive tendencies, our reaction to mere exposure is all too easy to co-opt.

  It certainly doesn’t hurt when we go beyond mere exposure to the level of conversation—and not only have a conversation, but then have accurate recall for the details when we make our next bid for trust. We like it when we feel someone knows the “real” us. Something as simple as remembering our name can instantly turn a confidence artist from persona non grata to someone we like, admire even, and certainly someone we’re willing to help. In one series of experiments, people were more likely to buy something from a relative stranger if that relative stranger happened to recall their name. They viewed the mere recall as a compliment; clearly they were important enough to note, and if that person thought so, then it was a very discerning person indeed. As that masterful manipulator Dale Carnegie put it, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” “Knowing” us is the con man’s bread and butter.

  In fact, some cons are based entirely on false knowledge. A seasoned technique: pretend you’re someone’s relative and that you met at a wedding. All you need to know is the name of the wedding party in question, and you’re golden. We would much rather fake knowledge than appear ungracious. Herman Melville hit upon the power of such false familiarity in his novel of the con, The Confidence-Man. Aboard a steamship, a con artist in various guises approaches select passengers. As he learns something about one from talking to another, or from simple observation, he uses it in his next conversation, pretending to be an old business acquaintance or social associate. It works like a charm.

  In February 1960, Mr. and Mrs. Alan James Blau of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, placed an official announcement in the New York Times. Their son, Andrew, had become engaged to a girl from California, a Miss Kelly Smith Hines. The date was set for June. The family was flooded with well-meaning congratulations; what a happy life event. Some days later, Mrs. Blau received a phone call. It was Kelly’s aunt, Nancy. She was passing through Pittsfield and wanted to meet Andrew’s parents. Mrs. Blau was a bit miffed—why hadn’t anyone warned her?—but happy to oblige. She met Aunt Nancy at the bus station, took her to lunch, had a wonderful conversation. Aunt Nancy told her about her house in Carmel, inviting her to stay when it came time for the wedding. They talked about wedding gifts—Spode china, Aunt Nancy suggested; a wonderful choice, Mrs. Blau concurred. At the end of the afternoon, it was time to drive the visiting guest back to the bus station. Alas, Aunt Nancy was absentminded. She only had traveler’s checks with her. Would Mrs. Blau kindly loan her fifty dollars for the remaining trip? Well, of course. She was almost family.

  Later that evening, Mrs. Blau called her son in New York. Why hadn’t he told her about Aunt Nancy? she demanded, slightly annoyed. Andrew was surprised. Aunt who? He called Kelly. Kelly drew a blank. Kelly called her mother. Her mother was perplexed. Mrs. Hines called her mother, Kelly’s grandmother. The mystery only deepened. Aunt Nancy, it turned out, was a professional wedding impostor. She would read announcements in newspapers, visit parents, and come away with meals, housing, and “small loans” in the process. Thus she made her modest living. (Today, Kelly is of a more forgiving bent. She feels that “the poor woman was single and bored and just looking to be part of other people’s lives for a little while.”)

  Aunt Nancy is the perfect embodiment of faked familiarity: do your homework, and the put-up falls rapidly into place. You don’t have to expend much effort on the groundwork that forms the basis of real familiarity, and instead, reap the same psychological benefits by simply appearing to be closer than you are and to know more than you do.

  Cerf has been out of the hacking-for-hire business for over a decade. But recently, he said, he checked in with some of his old teammates. Hadn’t their jobs, he wondered, gotten far more difficult over time, as companies and people alike became more tech savvy? Quite the contrary. They’d grown easier. Now the HumInt effort didn’t even require all that much physical legwork. All you needed to do was successfully friend someone on Facebook or connect with them socially on some other network—and if you could get them to see you as friendly long enough to click on just one link or download just one file, the whole system would eventually be yours. One entry point is all that is required.

  We reveal a great deal about ourselves without necessarily realizing it. And everything we reveal becomes the perfect fodder for the well-executed put-up, to then be used to gain our trust. Even a novice could find out, say, our bidding history or shopping preferences on eBay—and any public gift list, be it on Amazon or a wedding or baby registry, can give further color to not only our desires but our important life events. Security questions like mother’s maiden name, too, can be easily hacked by a quick search through public records. All a con artist needs is to do his homework.

  And to a con artist, that legwork is always worth it, no matter how difficult or devious the process. The put-up, after all, is the the foundation of his livelihood. On July 14, 1975, Sandip Madan lost his younger brother, Gunish, known as Chuchu to the family. He was only thirteen, and his death came as an utter shock. Their mother, understandably, was devastated. “She was distraught with grief that lasted for decades,” Madan told me, “and sought spiritual comfort.” In the spring of 1978, her depression still acute, she was offered a brief glimmer of hope. A close friend of the family’s told them that a famous sadhu, a Hindu ascetic purported to have divine powers, was visiting New Delhi. His name was Bhootnath. And he could bring the whole family to see him.

  The Madan family arrived in Bhootnath’s temporary residence. Outside his audience chamber, the anteroom was filled with followers and would-be supplicants. The excitement was palpable. Some exchanged confidences about their hopes for the visit. Others extolled his past exploits. This was a true holy man.

  After a brief wait, they were shown into the presence of Bhootnath himself. “We met him as strangers he knew nothing about,” Madan says. But somehow, he was soon sharing insights that there was no apparent way he could have known. “He had an uncanny knowledge about my mother having lost her child and being in torment about it.” He saw, he said, the boy’s soul. He was in the afterlife. He was happy. And he wanted his mother to be happy, too. At peace, at last. She was unnerved—who wouldn’t be? She hadn’t shared any of this. But she was also relieved. Maybe they had found a holy man after all.

  Bhootnath suddenly shifted his attention. He looked straight at Sandip. He had just glimpsed a slice of his future, he said. He would be joining the IAS, India’s civil service. Sandip was shocked. It was indeed his aspiration. How had he known?

  The audience was over. Bhootnath waved his arms and, out of thin air, prasad appeared before them—holy food, some nuts and raisins. He gave them his blessing and sent them on their way.

  Had they just been in the presence of divinity? Something about the visit didn’t sit quite right. At the last minute, Sandip’s new wife, Anita, and an aunt, Ranjit, his mother’s younger sister, had decided to join in the excursion. And about the two of them, Bhootnath had been both wrong and clueless. How could he have been so right about some things and so completely off base about others?

  The answer was far less holy. The same family friend who had set up the visit had also been giving Bhootnath information to prepare him for the meeting. And the details he hadn’t been able to glean—well, those anteroom supplicants weren’t quite what they seemed, either. They were his associates, posing as guileless hangers-on to pick what crumbs of knowledge might fall from the actual visitors.

  For several months, Madan recalls, Bhootnath was the toast of New Delhi. Everyone was excited. Magazines and newspapers
wrote about him. Wealthy donors flocked to his side. But then he made one slip too many, and fell as quickly as he rose, to be replaced, in short order, by the next miracle worker.

  Even if there’s no Facebook and no willing friend—well, con artists are enterprising. No piece of data is too small for the put-up, and no amount of effort to obtain it too large. In 1898, Mollie Burns, a schoolteacher and typist, fell ill on a trolley car in uptown Manhattan. Luckily, a Good Samaritan was there to help. Elizabeth Fitzgerald took pity on the sick girl and walked her to her hotel room. Was she not from around here? she asked as she led her down the sidewalk. Actually, she was, Burns admitted. It was just that she’d had a fight with her mother and had left home in a huff. Hence the hotel room. Fitzgerald sympathized—mothers were tough—and, after checking to make sure that Mollie had what she needed, took her leave. She had to get on with her day.

  Except her day, oddly enough, would now center on her chance acquaintance. In Harlem, where she lived, Fitzgerald was known as Madame Zingara, the famed clairvoyant of Harlem. And she couldn’t let an opportunity like this pass her by. It was the thing of a moment for a practiced hand like herself to track down Burns’s mother. And from there, over a nice cup of sympathetic tea, to learn that the topic of the fight had been an affair that Burns was having with a married man, one E. T. Harlow.