Scam Artists' Applying their Craft with new Mind Games

--Well planned psychological approaches employed

Magalia, California--It's just like a magic act, is the claim of scam fighters. With more quick-tricks than a magician on amphetamines, with the illusion of tarot cards plucked from their sleeves, the scam artists wow their audiences. From the scam artist's point of view, following are 7 of these tricks of the trade which are rigidly exercised when trying to seduce a group of people. (Paraphrased from the writings of Jack Payne, founder and former publisher of Business Opportunities Digest, author of 55 business books, and the novel Six Hours Past Thursday, who has followed the antics of the con man for the past 45 years.)

Eliminate self-righteous skeptics right off the top. Never, ever, respond in kind to their emotional utterances of protest. Instead, nit-pick them to death with every kind of unrelated trivia you can think of. Usually, if your initial claims are outrageous enough, this will serve adequately as a distraction to silence these kill-joy malcontents. Where it doesn't, augment your retort by telling them that their attention span is slight, and their need to improve their powers of observation is a pressing one. Offer to help them by laying more unrelated nonsense on them, at the same time demanding that they pay close attention so they will not insult your intelligence by demanding that you further explain.

Pitch your product / service to senior citizens, religious types, the disadvantaged, hard-working family farmers, and groupings of people who are by circumstance dependent on others, or by nature either born followers, or naive adherents to "faith" and "trust." These are your primary markets.

Outrage your audience against a mythical government agency you must fight. These make good scapegoats. Make the suckers a part of your conspiracy-fighting battle by giving you money to wage your sterling crusade.

Always get your victims to pay primary attention to dramatic theory rather than any evidence of reality which could be logically measured.

Be bold, loud. Make your claims in the form of rapier-like thrusts, sharp verbal jabs that will be clearly heard. People tend to think something transparently out in the open could not possibly be suspect.

Don't be too greedy in the beginning Shoot for only a small, initial amount of up-front money. $20-$30 is a good range--for an information kit of some form. Once the sucker has paid that much it's easier to squeeze him for more.

You've got to force your investors to surrender their rights to legal action, by any means you can manufacture. Give them a statement to sign at the last possible minute (as if it is so unimportant that you had almost forgotten it). or mask your disclaimer in a nondisclosure agreement containing print so small their eyeballs would bleed if they tried to read it.

These are just a few of the "basics." Says Payne, "The end game is always to create an atmosphere where emotion trumps logic. And, with identity theft at record levels, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000,000 incidents a year in the U.S. alone, con games are now of epidemic proportions, good spawning grounds for new scams."