Their sentencing didn’t stop others from trying to find the next best use for the fraudulent devices. In October 2014, Samuel and Joan Tree were arrested for, among other things, claiming that a similar detector could find Madeleine McCann, a young girl who had been missing. If you just placed a photo of the missing child into the machine, it would home in on her location. The emotion and story were built in; all that was needed was the right con artist to set the play in motion.
* * *
Why is the emotional approach so successful when it comes to the play? Simply put, because emotions cause us to act in a way that nothing else quite does—and action is just what the confidence artist wants. That is the con’s entire endpoint. When our emotions are awakened, we tend to rely on them more than on anything else. In the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore ran a series of studies that looked at whether people’s emotions colored how they processed information and made subsequent decisions. What they found, time and time again, was that when we’re asked to make a judgment, we usually ask ourselves, “How do I feel about it?” When the answer is negative, we see it as evidence of something being wrong. This room just gives me a bad feeling, you’ll tell yourself. When it’s positive, however, we think we’re satisfied. This phone has amazing features, we’ll say—even if we haven’t actually evaluated any of them. When we’re angry, we think future events that are bad are the result of human error; when we’re sad, that they’re situationally determined. They called the phenomenon “mood as information.” How I happen to be feeling is giving me concrete evidence of how I should act—even if, in fact, my decision is totally distinct. The way I process the information will be colored by my emotion all the same.
Another name for it is the affect heuristic: we make decisions based on whether we feel that something is “good” or “bad,” without much conscious analysis. Each person we meet, each thing we hear, each event or sensation we experience is immediately marked by an emotional tinge, a tinge acquired over years of similar experiences and memories. When we hear an emotional story or experience an emotional event, our mind tends to go back immediately to anything like it that we’ve felt in the past. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, calls this the affect pool. We then act not just based on the current moment but based on the associations with all the prior moments like it, be they good or bad.
In one sense, it matters little what we’re actually feeling: any emotional arousal will cloud our judgment to some extent. It makes us unthinking and it makes us malleable. It’s perfectly understandable why it’s the favored approach of many a police interrogator and lawyer, not just con artists. Arousal can compel us to act against our long-term interest—because, in the immediate term, we suddenly can’t quite tell the difference. The most primitive parts of our brain take over the rational. In one study, arousal alone was enough to get someone to agree with a request for help; it little mattered what the content of the request might happen to be.
What visceral states do is create an intense attentional focus. We tune out everything else and tune in to the in-the-moment emotional cues. It’s similar to the feeling of overwhelming hunger or thirst—or the need to go to the bathroom—when you suddenly find yourself unable to think about anything else. In those moments, you’re less likely to deliberate, more likely to just say yes to something without fully internalizing it, and generally more prone to lapses that are outside the focus of your immediate attention. (In fact, one study showed that having to pee made people more impulsive: they were so focused on exercising control in one area that their ability to do so elsewhere faded.)
Cons, long and short both, thrive on in-the-moment arousal: we have no time to repent. The best play makes use of that tendency. Con artists heat us up. That is their living. As one put it, “It is imperative that you work as quickly as possible. Never give a hot mooch time to cool off. You want to close him while he is still slobbering with greed.”
Emotion in the moment matters. But we find it almost impossible to anticipate future emotion—like the regret that might come from being too hasty now. “Today’s pain, hunger, anger, etc. are palpable, but the same sensations anticipated in the future receive little weight,” George Loewenstein writes.
In 2001, Jeff Langenderfer, a behavioral economist at Meredith College, and Terence Shimp, professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina, decided to test directly what factors could make someone more susceptible to the influence of a con artist. That year alone, scams had cost the United States over $100 billion, some $40 billion of that from phone scams. The numbers were rising quickly, but, Langenderfer felt, little was being done to get at the root causes: an understanding of who was most likely to fall victim, and how and why they would do so.
Some people don’t see the signs of fraud, true, but, he felt, this couldn’t be the fundamental reason. If it were, there wouldn’t be nearly as much diversity in the victim pool. It was, he concluded, a question of visceral influence: greed, hunger, lust, and the like. “They are so eager to get their hands on the proffered scam payoff that they fail to pay even rudimentary attention to the details of the proposed transaction and ignore scam cues that may be obvious to others not so overwhelmed by desire,” he wrote. The emotional outcome becomes the center of focus, and logic falls away. And that is precisely what the play is all about.
But although most any emotion can make us act, emotion isn’t a homogeneous mass. Specific emotions can make us act in specific ways and process things in specific patterns—patterns that the savvy artist can readily exploit. We don’t make decisions the same way when we’re upset or anxious, for instance, as we do when we’re happy. The play must be directed at the precise sort of con the grifter is planning to perpetrate. It’s not always enough to make us emotional; you have to think ahead and tailor the approach with the eventual touch (the actual moment of fleecing the mark) in mind.
Sometimes the process in play is mood congruity: we process information in a way that corresponds best to our emotional state. When we’re upset, for example, we tend to focus on the negative inputs that come our way; the result is a different sort of action than we’d undertake in, say, a happy moment. In one study, people who were sad wanted to partner with someone who had better interpersonal skills, like a “friendly” person, rather than someone good at the task they had before them—for instance, someone who “usually does well on his exams.”
Sadness likewise makes us more prone to risk taking and impulsivity—the perfect play for a certain type of con. If you want someone to take a risky financial gamble? Say, invest in your perfect scheme or chance it on a game of three-card monte? Sadness is your best friend. Target the person in the midst of a life crisis, not the one who happily has everything.
Indeed, the play often works best when we’re at emotional low points already. Con artists love funerals and obituaries, divorces and scandals, company layoffs and general loneliness. Sometimes they actually read about personal news—local papers are treasure mines for what is happening to whom, and Facebook’s ubiquity makes even those look obsolete. A friend of mine—call her Alexis—found herself the victim of an attempted scam after a series of Facebook posts made it clear that she was going through a breakup. (She had inadvertently befriended the con artist, an all too common occurrence.) Other times, they simply read people. A dejected walk is easy to spot if you’re looking for it.
But the play need not rely on sadness. Certain types of cons thrive on positive moods, and the expert con man knows precisely which is which and runs the play accordingly. When we’re happy, we don’t analyze data nearly as systematically as we otherwise would, and thus, become far more open to persuasion. In one study, happy people were equally persuaded by a strong and a weak argument, whereas sad ones were only swayed by the strong. A separate study found that happy individuals were more reliant on heuristics, things like the status of the person doing the persuasion or perceived expertise, whereas sad ones r
elied more on content—what the person was actually saying.
Some emotion also makes us more irrational than others. It’s good to make someone happy or sad if you’re trying to con them, but what if you can also make them fearful—like the natural play during the Ebola crisis or a war? If the emotion is strong enough, we don’t see anything else. We’ll drive hundreds of miles to avoid flying, even though our risk of dying on that trip is much higher than in a plane crash. We’ll avoid vaccinating our child for fear of autism when the risk of measles is actually quite real, and that of a developmental disorder caused by a vaccine, nonexistent. In the fall of 1991, a plane made an emergency landing midflight. The reason: there was a mouse on board. People ran screaming into the aisles, thereby putting the aircraft in danger. Irrational fears trump rational reasoning.
When executing the play, fear is one of the con artist’s great friends. In one study, a team of psychologists decided to test the effects of different types of fear on people’s willingness to comply with a request. First they located cars that had been parked illegally on the streets of Opole, Poland. Then they employed some deft perceptual trickery: on the windshields of some cars, they placed fake parking tickets; on the windshields of others, they placed advertisements that were designed to look ticket-like. As a control condition, they placed advertisements on car doors, a place where no self-respecting cop would ever put a ticket. After the drivers returned and had a chance to inspect the researchers’ handiwork, each driver was approached for a favor. The measure of interest: would she comply?
The premise of the setup was relatively straightforward. Drivers who received fake tickets would feel nothing but anxiety. Until they were told otherwise, they thought they’d been caught red-handed (red-wheeled?). Drivers who received the ads that looked like tickets would feel anxious first, but then immensely relieved that they had, in fact, escaped. And those who’d gotten the ads on the door wouldn’t feel much of anything, other than perhaps annoyance at the intrusion. What the researchers wanted to know was whether these different emotional setups would result in different susceptibility to requests. And, indeed, they did. The single most persuadable type of driver: the one who had just experienced a wave of relief following anxiety. The second: the one who’d experienced only anxiety. The least: the one who’d felt nothing. The authors concluded that the emotional drain of anxiety followed by the wave of emotional relief created a state of relative mindlessness. It’s the classic good cop–bad cop, or, rather, bad cop–good cop approach.
In a follow-up, the researchers discovered something else: people were more likely to give money to a stranger asking for a donation after they’d heard a police whistle when they’d been jaywalking. As they reached the other side of the street, a student would approach them and ask for money. She’d either give no justification (“Excuse me, would you please give us some money?”), a bogus justification (“Excuse me, we are collecting money. Would you please give us some, because we have to collect as much money as possible?”), or a real justification (“Excuse me, we are from the Students for the Handicapped organization. Would you please join our charity action, because we have to collect as much money as possible to cover the cost of a holiday camp for mentally handicapped children?”). If no police whistle had blown at all, people were likely to give money only in the last condition—a real donation for a real cause. If the fake police whistle sounded, followed by the relief of knowing no actual fine was coming, however, their mindlessness increased apace. Now they’d reach for their wallets in any situation, whether justified or not. Imagine the implications for the play: create a sense of fear, and then the feeling of relief (not to worry! there’s a solution!), and your mark is all but guaranteed to fall.
From the first snake oil sale, cons that play on our anxieties about our health have been among the leading scams of the world. They have everything needed for the fear-based play built into them: a health concern, real or not, followed by the relief of knowing there’s a remedy. There’s the late-nineteenth-century salesman of actual snake oil, Clark Stanley, prone to dramatic demonstrations with rattlers, who promised an end to everything from rheumatism to headaches to paralysis. (His concoction was 99 percent mineral oil.) There’s John Brinkley, who, in the nineteen-teens, preyed on the male fear of impotence to peddle the perfect solution: a transplant of goat testicles. There’s William Bailey, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, convinced hapless marks that radium would reinvigorate the lowest of energy levels (it glowed, after all; it would make you glow, too!) and cure coughs, flus, and other woes. And today, of course, there are the detox diets, pills, and supplements that promise everything from curing cancer to letting you lose weight with no effort, the countless unregulated companies and spokespeople who hold the perfect cure for whatever ails you. Fearmongering knows no expiration date. It is a venerable course for the play to take—one of many, but one that is endlessly powerful.
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On September 16, 2014, Aurora Hepburn walked into a Calgary clinic. She was fourteen, she said, and had been abducted, sexually assaulted, and tortured. “There was considerable impact to a lot of the professionals that were working on this investigation,” Kelly Campbell, a sergeant with Calgary Police Service’s Child Abuse Unit, told media. “Our concern was that there were actual victims out there, more victims.”
If this scenario sounds oddly familiar, it’s because it is: even after her Irish escapade and deportation, Samantha Azzopardi was back. And she was just as talented at weaving her deceptions as she’d ever been. Canadian authorities spent $157,000 on identifying her before her identity became clear—yet another foreign government expending resources to track perpetrators that had never existed.
How had Sammy managed it, after the deportation, the travel bans, the familial monitoring? Like so many impostors before her, she seemed to have a rubber knack for resuming her chosen lifestyle moments after each unmasking. Azzopardi hadn’t been back in Australia for six months after her Irish caper when she again managed to secure a passport. She made her way back to Ireland—she’d been booted too quickly. She wasn’t done. She’d spent months preparing her return, corresponding with a Midlands family with two children, this time to work as a potential au pair.
Alan and Eilis Fitzgerald needed someone to help care for their small sons, four-year-old Jack and two-year-old Harry. And so, they began to look at au pair sites for a possible match. One young woman stood out immediately. Her name was Indie O’Shea. She was eighteen, had Irish roots herself, and was eager to come to Dromod. They took up a correspondence. “We were in contact with her for ages online,” Eilis later said. “And she seemed a perfect fit and really lovely. We were friends before she even arrived.”
She got on famously with Harry and Jack. Eilis and Alan quickly came to see her as part of the family. “She was great with the boys and around the house,” Eilis said. But the family didn’t know much about her. She would drop hints here and there—private jets, powerful relations, false names out of necessity—but nothing definitive. “It was like Hansel and Gretel,” Alan recalled. “She was leaving crumbs for us to find so we could discover who she was.” Soon the crumbs started adding up. Indie O’Shea wasn’t really Indie O’Shea. Instead, she was the illegitimate daughter of Princess Madeleine of Sweden. She had been raised by one of Madeleine’s cousins and her biological father.
The next day, O’Shea tried to open a bank account. It was denied: her papers didn’t add up. The family found her sobbing on the floor. Her mother, she said, had died in Miami.
A few days later, her passport, she said, had run out. But no fear. She’d previously been an au pair for Jens Christiansen, a Danish politician. He would sort it out. Eventually, she returned with a British passport. It had a fake name and a different photograph. It’s okay, she assured them. She was allowed to do this. “The ‘family’ had organized it,” Eilis said.
Six weeks later, O’Shea left, unexpectedly. Searching through her belongings, t
he Fitzgeralds found multiple papers with a name they had never seen: Samantha Azzopardi. They were confused to no end. “We got on brilliant and she was really such a nice person,” Eilis recalls. How could she not be who she said?
It was then that Sammy made her way to Canada, where she turned up as Aurora Hepburn.
The Confidence Game Page 14
