Saturday 31 January 2009

So you're saying that if a crazy man tells me he can see the future using eggs I should maybe ignore him? Oh, this is too complicated for me.

I'm watching The Real Hustle: High Stakes. They are doing a con called "The Psychic". In it, one of the hustlers has set himself up as a fortune teller, done a bit of trickery, and told a woman she needs to put a load of money somewhere safe so that he can nick it later.

Now that's all well and good, but really? This is a woman who thinks he's got psychic abilities and that an egg was genuinely full of blood. You could get more cash out of her by not getting her to put loads of it in a box for you to steal. I doubt if there's any upper limit on how much money I could get out of her if I was an unscrupulous conman, at least before I came up against the wall of her total earnings over her lifetime. This is not exactly a Derren Brownian level of sophistication being discussed here. When your con relies on the mark being the single most gullible person in all of London, it really doesn't matter what you do: nobody watching a show about Here Are Some Cons So You Can't Get Fooled By Them was ever in any danger of falling for that one.

I guess really that the idea that there exist psychics who aren't conning their customers is what's annoying me here.

2 comments:

Friz said...

Well, I have had experience with The Real Hustle which basically admitted how none of it was real: http://channelflip.blogspot.com/2007/10/unreal-hustle.html

I do think they run out of cons eventually.

Andrew said...

This is true. But... he charged her £25 for the initial session. It lasted half an hour. She paid that before he did any cheap conjuring tricks on her. If I've got a goose laying that kind of egg, I'm not going to eat it. That's all I'm saying.