Terms and conditions are everywhere and most people have become trained not to read them simply because they are now comically long and deliberately complicated. How many times online have you clicked that button without even opening the window, even to just look at what you’re agreeing to? In any interaction where money is involved, one party usually makes more and this is almost always because their position or strategy is preferable. For example, a loan company makes a profit and their customers lose money, but this is a fair trade-off if the cost of the loan is acceptable in return for access to an agreed amount. The loan company takes a risk, but this is mitigated by their diligence when processing each applicant. The customer chooses from whom to borrow by estimating who is offering the best deal, but in some cases, loan companies obfuscate the details of their product in order to encourage people to underestimate the cost. This is by no means universal. Legislation in some countries has forced lenders to be more transparent, but even when horrific repayment plans or harsh penalties are clearly illustrated, a person’s need for the loan focuses them solely on the amount they hope to borrow, not how much it will cost them in the long run. This might explain why a lot of advertising concentrates on how easy it is to get the loan, rather than how difficult it will be to pay back.
The smart borrower understands that he or she has a negative expectation and takes the time to minimize their losses within the law, while the lenders do all they can to avoid this. Credit cards can be managed by switching from one card to another, taking advantage of deals for new customers in order to cut the percentage being charged. Depending on what deals are available, it might be possible to save a considerable amount over time, but the credit card companies would prefer you to ignore these options and continue paying them in a timely fashion. To this end they offer deals to encourage loyalty and penalties to restrict your options, so most people simply go with the flow and pay their bills; just as most blackjack players take whatever cards they’re dealt and let Lady Luck do the rest.
In the end, this is simply capitalism at work and it’s perfectly fair and above board most of the time. Even when a level of transparency is enforced, the focus is firmly directed to what the customer wants, rather than what it will cost him in the long run. When deception of any kind is employed, even subtly, then I believe this becomes sharp practice to varying degrees.
There’s an old joke about a traveling salesman and his amazing watch that could do anything. Carrying two heavy suitcases, he approaches a man on the street and asks if he would be interested in owning a miracle of modern technology. Pulling back his sleeve, the salesman reveals an impressive device strapped to his wrist. “It tells time in every country, you just say the name. Japan.” The digital display changes to reveal the exact time in Tokyo. “London,” he says and the watch changes again to reflect Greenwich Mean Time. “It does much more than that. It can scan any document with this camera and can send and receive faxes—there’s even a tiny roll of paper inside. It can display TV channels from any network in the world. It can tell you your exact geographical position down to half an inch either way and it can store thousands of your favorite films, music, or TV shows. It even has a tiny projector built into the side. Best of all, it only costs five hundred bucks!” The impressed stranger immediately reaches for his wallet and hands over five one-hundred-dollar bills and the salesman removes the watch and puts it onto the other man’s wrist. Satisfied, the man is about to walk away when the salesman calls him back and hands him both of the heavy suitcases, saying “don’t forget the batteries!”
I first heard that story in the early eighties, and those two suitcases tend to remind me of the lengthy contracts most people sign in order to own the latest and greatest gadget or gizmo.
The Monty Hall Problem
As human beings, we often see complexity where there is none, or ignore a simple solution while searching for something more satisfying. Magicians know this well. Our best secrets are often devilishly simple, sometimes counterintuitive, but mostly disappointing if the method is revealed. Con games are all about finding or creating opportunities where the hustler secretly has the upper hand, but it’s possible to find an edge in legitimate situations so you can identify the best way to play. To that end, we’re going to look at a classic game scenario where the best strategy has proven difficult for many people to understand.
In the well-known “Monty Hall Problem,”* the optimum strategy is often difficult to accept because the worst strategy appears to make more sense.
It’s highly unlikely you’ll ever find yourself in this exact scenario, but we can use this to illustrate that a powerful advantage can exist without being immediately obvious.
Briefly, the Monty Hall Problem works like this:
You are playing a game of three-card monte. On the table are three face down cards: one red queen of hearts and two random black cards. If you choose the queen, then you win a dollar.
You’re the player and the person running the game is the performer. This is nothing more than a one-in-three guess but once you choose a card, the performer will offer a second choice.
Once you have nominated a card, the performer will turn over one of the remaining two. The card he turns over will always be a losing black card because he will always know where the queen is.
Once a black card has been turned face up, you are given the chance to stick with your original choice or switch to the other unseen card.
Many people believe, when presented with the second choice, that this is now a fifty/fifty proposition and that it makes no difference whether they switch or not. In fact, the odds of winning are doubled if you switch.
The problem is that most people reject this idea once the second choice is offered. They started with one in three but, once one of the losing cards is revealed, only two choices remain and those appear to each have a fifty-fifty chance of being the winner.
As with many magic effects, con games, or puzzles, it’s all about how you look at it. In all variations of the classic Monty Hall problem, there are three choices consisting of two losers and one winner: in other words, one chance in three. It is important, however, to remember that the performer who is offering you this choice knows exactly where the winner is and will only reveal losing options. At this point the player is offered the chance to switch, but this second choice is definitely not a fifty-fifty proposition.
Let’s stick with playing cards but change the numbers. Instead of one winning card and two losing cards, let’s add eight more losing black cards. Now there are eleven cards on the table but there’s still only one winner.
The rules are the same. One card can be selected but, before it is turned over, the performer will remove nine losing cards from the remainder and turn them over, leaving just one card from the group you did not choose. That card could be either the winning red card or just another black card.
If I offered you the chance to switch in this example, would you stick with your original choice? Do you still think this is just a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right?
You know that there was one red card in the packet and that the first card you took had a one in eleven chance of being that red card, so it should be obvious that the red card is much more likely to be among the other ten cards. Hopefully this makes the switching strategy more obvious.
It is the actions of the performer who’s running the game that determines the odds, because he will always remove nine losing cards leaving either a tenth loser or the winning card. The remaining card will only be a losing black card if you happened to select the red card as your first choice, which we know is the least likely outcome.
If you chose one of the majority black cards first, then the remaining card from the other group (after nine black cards have been removed by the performer) will be the red winner ten times out of eleven!
This is because the procedure reverses the odds against the player on the first round, becoming for the player on the second round if he switches.
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This is a result of the conscious intervention by the performer, who removes all but one of the remaining options because the cards he removes will always be losing options. If the winning card is in the remaining ten, the performer is forced to leave it in play. Therefore, when you make that first choice, you are isolating a card that is more likely to be a loser and will then trade it for a card that is more likely to be a winner.
If a second person enters the game after the losing cards have been turned over, they would see only two choices and their chances are fifty-fifty of picking the right card because they do not have the same information as you. This is an excellent example of playing a game according to the information available to the player. You have been involved since the start of the game, so the above strategy allows you to double your odds of success by switching. You know that one card was part of the group that had a much better chance of containing the winner, that this other card retains those positive odds and is therefore the better choice. The new player knows none of this and might as well flip a coin and take his chances.
This is where people often get tripped up because they put themselves into the position of that second player. It’s important to remember that the card you first selected had the odds against it and that the remaining card (and its group) had the odds in its favor.
In case it’s still not clear, imagine the entire deck is in play and that only the queen of hearts was the winner. If I let you choose one at random (unseen) and I then threw away fifty cards that definitely were not the queen of hearts, leaving just one—what are the chances that the only card I didn’t throw away is the winning queen? Do you think I’ve got the queen or do you think it’s more likely that you managed to somehow pick it from the fifty-two options at the beginning? Now would you switch?
The bigger the number of losing cards, the clearer it should be that switching in the second round is the best strategy.
Now let’s return to the classic version with just three choices. As with the examples above, there are more losers than winners. Once you make your initial choice, there are two cards remaining and the odds clearly state that the winner is more likely to be one of the other two. Think of your own choice as an isolated group and the remaining cards as a second group. A moment ago, you knew that the other group had double the odds of containing the winner and now, thanks to the intervention of the performer, the losing options from the other group have been identified, leaving just one card that retains the same odds of being a winner as the entire group had of containing the winner.
The conscious nature of the performer’s procedure ensures that only losing cards are turned over after your initial selection, but if this was a random selection by the performer, switching offers no advantage because one time in three, the randomly flipped card will be a queen. It is only when the performer knows which card to expose that the advantage exists.
Once the performer has intervened and revealed a losing option in that other group, he has given you a huge advantage, but only if you understand how and why to take it. As the Monty Hall Problem shows, it would be very easy to tell a player that sticking with their original choice is as good as switching. Even mathematicians have struggled to recognize why changing doubles the odds of success. This makes that lie easy to believe and that’s a powerful tool for a con artist or under-handed business.
On the Internet a related form of chicanery has become so common that most of us encounter examples on a daily basis. By playing online transactions as a game, options can be restricted, choices manipulated, and positive outcomes for the customer disguised by companies taking an unfair advantage.
Sound familiar?
The term “Dark Patterns” refers to user interfaces that are deliberately designed to trick people. Some of the largest companies in the world employ subtle methods to misdirect users from certain choices on a page or build those pages with the intent of concealing certain elements while technically including legally required options or notices.
These ploys have evolved from blatant deceptions into subtle arrangements based on knowing how people interact with a form or page, the order in which their attention is directed, and how elements become more or less noticeable.
As a rule, people tend to take the easiest option when confronted with any unfamiliar interface; their choices are usually guided by the clearest, most obvious path, from the beginning to the end of a process.
Any procedure where additional costs can be incurred or choices restricted is susceptible to these questionable techniques. Online forms for services like insurance, air travel, car rental, and subscriptions will often try to deliberately manipulate the user toward a preferred outcome. Even extremely savvy users can miss an option that has either been preselected or camouflaged.
A simple example would be an option to receive newsletters that is preselected as “yes” but the “tick box” option is placed after the “continue” button that advances the user to the next page. Designers might claim this as an innocent mistake; that they didn’t consider people who tend to follow a linear path and would click “continue” before examining the rest of the page. Great care goes into the design of every website at that level and very little happens by accident.
Sometimes advertisements are disguised to look like part of the site they inhabit in order to sucker people into clicking onto other pages. If you have ever tried to download software from certain sites, you will have encountered the bogus “download” button. In one example I found eight identical green download buttons on one page and only one of them was for the software I actually wanted. The others were for products I definitely did not want. I would caution anybody about using any services from any company who needs to trick people into installing their software.
Many people will accept a three-dollar charge rather than spend a little extra time locating the correct button or drop-down menu, because the simplest path is usually the most attractive (as con artists know well). Large companies can make huge profits from small variations in prices, so any way they can build an advantage into these processes is worthwhile.
The website www.darkpatterns.org lists dozens of examples, categorized with names such as “bait and switch,” “misdirection,” and “trick questions.” The practice has become more sophisticated over time. On many sites it’s likely that an option is hidden in plain sight or strategically placed to be ignored. It’s a clear example of an advantage play on the part of companies that employ such methods. They are increasing the odds of making higher profits simply by observing how people navigate and placing elements accordingly.
The ability to look at any transaction as a game to be won or lost is invaluable; your first question should always be “what is the best way to secure a positive outcome?” In a casino, it’s possible to win even when the odds are against you (and of course, vice-versa), but in the real world, it’s easier to predict how things should work out. Your second question should be, “who has the best of it?” As a customer, that will usually be the provider since their job is to make a profit, and there’s nothing wrong with this unless they are consciously trying to make more than is reasonable.
As consumers, we can learn to identify the most beneficial options in any marketplace. In most cases, this is a matter of balancing cost and commitment or comparing offers to find the best deal. The trick is to spot the advantages being played against us and to negotiate the best possible variation based on the options available.
There is a point where some deals cross the bridge between grift and graft. I start to become concerned when a company wants me to believe that I have the edge, since any business that gives away its profit margin is doomed to fail. In these circumstances I always look for the catch that will reverse my fortune or throw me into a deep hole without a rope to climb out.
Footnote
* Monty Hall was the host of Let’s Make a Deal, a popular game show that aired in the 1960s and 1970s.
DIGITAL DECEPTION
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br /> Alex approached our fifth mark as he left the store, showed him a fake ID, and claimed to be a member of the Metropolitan Police. Immediately, the mark was keen to comply or resolve any misunderstanding; Alex walked him over to me so I could feed him the story.
“Did you use your credit card today, sir?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“We are currently monitoring this store because a member of staff is suspected of stealing customer’s details . . .”
At this point, Jess called over the radio to ask if we had intercepted someone of the mark’s description. She was pretending to be another officer inside the store but was actually sitting in a van across the parking lot, simply describing whomever we had stopped at that time. The mark heard this and any suspicion that we were not the real police quickly evaporated.
“This is just a formality,” I continued, “but we need anyone who used their card at the suspect’s register to give us their details so we can ensure your information doesn’t go online and so we can determine whether your details have been stolen when we make the arrest.”
The victim nodded as I handed him a clipboard, requesting that he fill out a form with all of the pertinent details. Meanwhile, Alex found another victim and brought him over so we could repeat the con.
We were emulating a scam that is all too common online and has cost banks, credit card companies, and their customers billions of dollars. After a few minutes we had credit card numbers, security codes, and addresses from a dozen people, not one of whom ever questioned our legitimacy. Our real-live reconstruction targeting real victims was so successful that within a few minutes we had more marks than we could possibly use on the show; it remains one of the simplest scams that I’ve ever filmed.
The Art of the Con Page 25
