There are a couple here that everyone knows.

BusketsMcBride: Whoever Greened this is a con artist.

My friend cons Walmart by buying stuff, using it for 3 months, and returning it with receipts. He calls it the "Walmart Rental Program".

My first job.was with a guy named Harry Stubbs. He sold door to door. With a name like that he was bound for con artist greatness.

I used to be a con artist but I reformed. However, my experience has given me useful skills used to avoid con games. For the low, low price of $20 I will teach you how to identify a con.

($20 later)
Hey, I sent you $20 and you still haven't given me anything!

That's the end of the lesson.

I knew one who was a former supervisor. He got 'investment' money from people on his team. A few hundred from a handful of team members, and the company was high turnover so he had fresh targets constantly.

Knew another guy who made weekend trips to gamble. Always took money from people on his crew. Their money never won, his money sometimes did.

I know this guy named Nate Ford.

Car salesmen and lawyers come to mind. Yea, I've known quite a few of them over the years.

I don't know them, but every attractive woman on match.com is actually a Russian con artist. Pretty sure.

My two year old. She does stuff she knows she is not supposed to and then smiles at me because she knows that I'll pick her up and kiss her even if she sets the dog on fire. One of her favorite tactics is to get into to something, get told she is doing wrong, and then run over and give me a big kiss to make everything go away. Works every time. What a little con artist!

bim1154: Car salesmen and lawyers come to mind.

No just care salesman... ANYONE in commision based sales.

I'm sure you will find it shocking but show business is filled with people that lie constantly.

With a smooth enough tongue and a plausible back-story it is possible to get several hundred thousand dollars worth of goods and services out of people for just the price of a few phone calls. And there is nothing illegal about it at all.

imprimere: My two year old. She does stuff she knows she is not supposed to and then smiles at me because she knows that I'll pick her up and kiss her even if she sets the dog on fire. One of her favorite tactics is to get into to something, get told she is doing wrong, and then run over and give me a big kiss to make everything go away. Works every time. What a little con artist!

Can't wait to hear what behaviors that turns into when she is a teenager.

/sometimes you gotta play hardball

I knew a real one once. Worked with him. He had served time for previous cons and scams, got out on good behavior. Our company hired him because they often would work with rehabilitated cons. Took him six months to work over everyone he had access that he thought he could con. Then he scampered when the well was too poisoned.

He played the "reformed con, newly found Chrst" angle at a company that was 99% Protestant and Proud. Took them in all kinds of petty "investment" scams.

Yup. Upstairs neighbor and I share the water bill. Now that she's moved out the landlord finds out she hasn't paid it in 6 months.

So she pocketed about 300 bucks from me that went in her pocket, and stuck my nice hippy landlord lady with the bill.

T.M.S.: I'm sure you will find it shocking but show business is filled with people that lie constantly.

With a smooth enough tongue and a plausible back-story it is possible to get several hundred thousand dollars worth of goods and services out of people for just the price of a few phone calls. And there is nothing illegal about it at all.

With a good enough tongue and the right looks you can get more than a few hundred thousand out of people.

imprimere: My two year old. She does stuff she knows she is not supposed to and then smiles at me because she knows that I'll pick her up and kiss her even if she sets the dog on fire. One of her favorite tactics is to get into to something, get told she is doing wrong, and then run over and give me a big kiss to make everything go away. Works every time. What a little con artist!

Oooh, you'd better nip that behavior in the bud right now or she'll make your life hell.

/voice of experience :(

I grew up hearing that from my mother on a near daily basis. I thought it was her paranoid delusions, but the Wife brings it up fairly often as well, so maybe the old bat wasn't as crazy as I thought.

I got an email from this guy in Nigeria, does that count? I also know a guy who works for the IRS.

A dude down the street from me tried to con me into some crazy pyramid scheme. He was doing the hard sell with it, too. Even after I started walking away he kept talking.

Funny this thread was made.

Check out the links and you decide if Andy West is a dangerous con man.

www.solutioneur.com

http://sites.google.com/site/andywestpublicrecord/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xj3Zc-SF0YE

More Migrating Coconut: bim1154: Car salesmen and lawyers come to mind.

No just care salesman... ANYONE in commision based sales.

more con-artisan than artist.

/extended care salesmen are the WORST!

Just go down to any car dealer. The place is full of them.

CallMeGomer: Just go down to any car dealer. The place is full of them.

Or Nigeria.

Aeon Rising: imprimere: My two year old. She does stuff she knows she is not supposed to and then smiles at me because she knows that I'll pick her up and kiss her even if she sets the dog on fire. One of her favorite tactics is to get into to something, get told she is doing wrong, and then run over and give me a big kiss to make everything go away. Works every time. What a little con artist!

Can't wait to hear what behaviors that turns into when she is a teenager.

/sometimes you gotta play hardball

KRSESQ: imprimere: My two year old. She does stuff she knows she is not supposed to and then smiles at me because she knows that I'll pick her up and kiss her even if she sets the dog on fire. One of her favorite tactics is to get into to something, get told she is doing wrong, and then run over and give me a big kiss to make everything go away. Works every time. What a little con artist!

Oooh, you'd better nip that behavior in the bud right now or she'll make your life hell.

/voice of experience :(

Ease up people. I'm not literally talking about anything that bad. There are plenty of times when I will let her cry her head off because she can't have her way.

I worked with a guy who ran the Nigerian e-mail scam at work. For a while he'd take cell phone calls and disappear for an hour. Then there were a couple days when we'd receive 500 page faxes calling him a "dick". Then there was a day when a couple guys stood next to his desk all day wanting to know where their money was. That day ended with him being escorted out of the building to the police waiting in the parking lot.

Pro Tip: If you're going to run an e-mail scam, don't target your co-workers.

I've got a cousin that sells Herbalife; seems like a con to me.

I know one who works in sales for a major telecommunications company in Denver, CO, who convinced his family and friends to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a medical marijuana dispensary on the west side of Colorado Springs. He tried to write the purchase agreement himself (failed miserably and defaulted, losing everything), never bothered sending his application into the state Dept of Revenue (but told the investors he was already being cleared by their investigators), then hired his personal cocaine dealer to be his legitimate weed business wholesale salesman (and kept this secret from everyone involved, turns out that the coke dealer Anthony was just unloading it on the streets of Denver, of course). His plan was to just see how long he could get away with it until the state of Colorado figured it out, since they were a bit swamped. When the shiat hit the fan, he blamed it all on me. Caught him and his skank wife (she was his coke dealer in Texas' girlfriend... what a good choice of wife) on video looting the business when they were supposed to be destroying all the illegal product at the advice of his second and third lawyer (first lawyer dropped him when he found out he was lying the whole time). They saw me videotaping them and actually got pissed at me. We ended up selling about $40,000 in mmj wholesale to other centers in 3 months before I discovered he was full of shiat. Oh, and he also smokes weed and does coke in front of his 3 and 6 year old daughters, and grows weed at his house even though he has no red card. I'm giving it some time before I call child services so it doesn't look so obvious that it is me. Does that count?

Yup, a girl I went to school with. She could con Scrooge McDuck out of his last penny. To this day she is still a con artist, but she's also a recovered crackhead who's strung out on pills and can't understand why her parents (she's 33) get pissed that she stays out all night at her dealer's house with her daughter. She's so good at what she does, she doesn't work, she doesn't go to school, she just gets up, tells her mom she'll be back later, and is stoned and drunk all day for free!

Guy I met who has currently 5 girlfriends. All of whom believe them to be his only girlfriend. The reason he is able to do this magic act? He tells them he is a full time Air Conditioning/ Natural Gas/ general repair guy who is on call 24/7 or just prefers the shift from 6pm- 6am.

His actual source of income is online gambling and getting them to each loan him money (usually small amounts) to make rent and continue to plow them untill a new one comes into the picture. It's a vicious cycle.

Worked with a real scum bag. Peter Clark of RAM satellite back in the late 80's early 90's. Peters game (when 10ft satellite dishes were the norm), was to have a fire sale....with customers satellite receivers. Customers would bring in their receivers for repair or upgrade, Peter would be short on cash, so he'd have a weekend fire sale. And of course, he didn't have enough money to purchase new receivers (for stock), so he'd take customers receivers, pair them with a new dish and sell that to another customer. In the meantime, customers would call asking when they'd be getting their receivers back from repair, and he'd put them off and off. Finally they'd get po'd, sue him in small claims court where he'd blame it on the customers, or the staff or whatever or settle for a fraction of money they'd lost. All the while stealing from Peter to pay Paul. Or he'd play the shell game. He'd sell off a "franchise" which was a rented space in a strip mall (Peterborough, Scarborough, Toronto, Oakville), where he'd include potted plastic plants, a couple of desks, a big sign that said "Ram Satellite" and he'd stick up a dish and hook up a cheap 20" television. He'd advertise in the local paper for people interested in purchasing a franchise which he'd sucker someone into buying into for $25,000 plus a percentage of their profits, and he was the exclusive dealer for their stock (another source for receivers for his fire sales by the way). I don't think one of those stores ever survived more than a year. He was into the PDR (Paradise Riders Club) for some serious bucks from what I remember as well. I'm surprised he never ended his days in the trunk of a car with a couple of holes in his cranium, but like a lot of lucky scumbags, Peter died in his sleep in the mid 1990's. He was the ultimate scum bag con man.

Yes...

Every cat.

Cat: Pet me, I promise its what I want!
Me: *pet pet pet*
Cat: see? dont you see how happy I am?
Me: *pet pet pet*
Cat: Now I am going to show you my new attack of doom *bite kick scratch kick kick claw*
Me: OH GOD!!! THE BLOOD IS EVERYWHERE!!!!
Cat: Pet me, I promise thats what I want

Well, I almost knocked this guy down when I had to go to the bathroom real bad...




He's got a great scam, and it's legal.

My dad was a con before he OD'd. I grew up in his trade to help gather funds from time to time. It's too bad I grew ethics... I was pretty good.

I worked as a professional musician for years. In fact, I just finished my second stint. I took a break for like 16 years, then found myself back in it again. We played HUGE sold out shows in HUGE venues. But shiat gets particularly stupid and ugly at a certain level.

I've since walked away from it again for very much the same reason I did the first time.

I would watch our manager pocket a WAD of $100s, and the rest of us in the band were lucky to get paid $50 to cover expenses. Tickets were sold on TicketMaster, so it was pretty easy to track how much was being raked in. This happened repeatedly.

So, to answer the question, "do I know a con artist?" Yes. A boatload of them. And they can all kiss my ass!

Migrating Coconut: bim1154: Car salesmen and lawyers come to mind.

No just care salesman... ANYONE in commision based sales.

Hold on there buddy! I resemble that remark!

Aeon Rising: T.M.S.: I'm sure you will find it shocking but show business is filled with people that lie constantly.

With a smooth enough tongue and a plausible back-story it is possible to get several hundred thousand dollars worth of goods and services out of people for just the price of a few phone calls. And there is nothing illegal about it at all.

With a good enough tongue and the right looks you can get more than a few hundred thousand out of people.

The problem is eventually you have to spend some of the non existent money you have "raised" to continue with the production. That's where the scam usually falls apart.

In my entirely non-scientific guess you can probably scam people out of about a quarter million worth of work for less than a hundred dollars.

Of course there is no profit to be made doing this. For the most part is it a pointless exercise.

My neighbor used to make counterfeit $20 bills.

Back in 98-99 I had to watch his house and he gave me the key. Naturally, I was a bastard and found the press and paper in the spare bedroom that was locked using the same key as the front door.

Not sure if he still does, with all of those new-fangle monopoly bills now.

Well I didn't see ex-stepfathers on that list.

Ex-stepdad married my mother when I was a year old. I spent my childhood moving all over the country. Every six months to a year we were moving to another state. I saw lots of amazing sights and had a ton of memorable experiences. It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started to realize this wasn't how the majority of people lived.

Neither my mother or I was aware that stepdad was Grifty McGrifterson for years. Things started becoming clear around the time I was 16 or 17 when a couple of his cons didn't go as planned. He apparently had started to get sloppy. He also had started utilizing both my Mother's and my identities for some of his scams.

There was a fark of a lot of drama when this all came out. Mom basically had a break down. It's slightly emotionally taxing having to process years upon years of lies all at once. Kudos to her for getting the fark out immediately.