Con Men, Fraudsters and The Golden Age of Scamming
It's never been easier to get cheated out of your money.
(Sadness alert: This won’t be a light read, but I think it’s important.)
One day some years back, I was heading to the New York Public Library to do research for a book project. I don’t remember what book it was; I do remember everything else about the day. A block south of the library’s main entrance, site of the famous marble lion statues –Patience and Fortitude are their names – I passed a cluster of people on the sidewalk and immediately recognized it as three-card monte, a popular con game at the time in which a dealer and his shills and lookouts set up shop on a cardboard box. The dealer has a deck of cards and shows his potential marks three cards, places them face down and then slides them quickly around. He designates one card as the ‘money’ card – typically the queen of hearts. All you need to do is point to the card you think is the queen after all the sliding, and you win however much you bet. The shills, frequently disguised as customers, will often win a round or two, emboldening others to give it a try by showing them how easy to win a quick $10 or $20. Just follow the dealer’s hands, and you win. It’s as simple as that.
Except that it’s not.
In three-card monte, as in all gambling enterprises, the house always wins. That’s why casinos are spreading like a virus across America, and why all those newly legalized online gambling outfits spend tens of millions to market themselves and promote their affiliation with professional sports leagues. Spending millions isn’t a problem when it makes you billions.
I knew very well that three-card monte is a scam, and have never partaken of it, before or since. But that day, well, I got sucked in. I am embarrassed to share that, but here at Coffey Grounds we believe in telling the truth. I watched the dealer and his shills for a few minutes, and it sure looked as if people were winning. Yes, I knew better. No, I did not trust my intuition. In that moment of weakness, I was positive I had the visual and mental acuity to track the dealer’s hands and find the queen. How hard can it be? I’d make a quick $20 and walk away, say hi to Patience and Fortitude and do my research. I put down a twenty and instantly felt guilty about it. (I also feel guilty if I use a supermarket express lane with 12 items even when the sign says 10 items or fewer, but that’s another Substack.) I knew it was illegal, and that the cops could come around the corner at any second, and still, I placed my wager. A naughty surge of excitement coursed through me. I pointed to the card on the right, certain I had schooled the dealer. He turned the card over. It wasn’t the queen of hearts; it was the ace of spades. I didn’t win, because nobody does. Through his world-class sleight of hand, the dealer was able to conceal the fact that the queen of hearts wasn’t even one of the three cards he was sliding around.
The dealer picked up my $20.
“Oh, man, I thought you had it,” one of the shills said to me, encouraging me to make another bet. “You’ll get it the next time.” I felt like the biggest rube on earth. There would be no next time. I skulked away, ashamed and humiliated all at once, my mind playing the same tape over and over:
How could you have been so naïve? How could you have actually fallen for this?
But enough about streetcorner sharks. I want to talk about fraudsters, writ large, because we are truly in The Golden Age of Scamming. You combine the anonymity and reach of the internet, the ubiquity of e-commerce and the sprawling growth of AI, and you have three key ingredients for a toxic stew of malfeasance. Factor in the propensity of a small subset of humans to be dirtbags, and well, hold on to your wallets. I don’t mean to make light of this, because there is nothing funny about it. By the Federal Trade Commission’s estimate, Americans were bilked out of $2.5 billion in 2023. I’m surprised the number isn’t higher. I’ve had to replace my credit cards at least a half-dozen times because somebody got a hold of my number and went on a shopping spree at Walmart or Target or wherever. Almost every day, I get emails congratulating me on winning an extremely valuable prize; all I need to do is provide some basic information, and oh yes, a credit card number just to cover the shipping. Every six months, my laptop is held hostage by a screen-wide message that looks legitimate – and terrifying – instructing me to call the number on the screen because my computer has been infected with malware and I am about to lose everything, unless I BUY THEIR ANTIVIRUS PROGRAM AT THIS VERY SPECIAL LOW PRICE NOW.
About a week ago, listening to an episode of The Daily, the outstanding New York Times podcast, I learned of a retired law-enforcement officer in California who was scammed out of $900,000 – including the house he was born and raised in – by a company that was allegedly helping him get out of a timeshare. It sounds inexplicably naïve, I know, but listen to the episode before you judge this man. These people were masterful con men who assured him every step of the way that he had nothing to worry about. Everything seemed completely legit. My default position is to trust people; maybe yours is, too. But the more you hear about things like this, the more I come away thinking that in 2024 you can like people and trust people in your orbit, but as it concerns the wider world, you need to be on high alert.
I have a much more personal – deeply personal – example of how crushing this Golden Age of Scamming can be. Ten years ago, my father-in-law, Edward J. Willi, Jr., age 81, got a call at his home in West Redding, Connecticut, from a man who said his name was Jeremy Whitford, and that he was an attorney in the U.S. Consulate in Mexico City. This ‘Mr. Whitford’ said that Ed’s grandson, our son Sean, had been involved in an automobile accident in Mexico City and that marijuana was found in the trunk of the car, and he was about to be taken to a Mexican jail. ‘Mr. Whitford’ wanted to do all he could to help. He said the consulate had custody of Sean but he needed Ed to post a $10,000 bond to ensure his safety. He also said Mexican authorities had issued a gag order and that he couldn’t tell anyone about what was going on. Not even his daughter. Any delay, or any effort to reach out to his local authorities, would put Sean in grave danger. ‘Mr. Whitford’ even put ‘Sean’ on the phone, no matter that Sean was thousands of miles from Mexico City and was in no danger whatsoever.
“Tata, I’m so sorry, but please help me,” said a voice that my father-in-law thought sounded very much like Sean. Now my father-in-law is a native New Yorker, a skeptic by nature, about the least gullible person I have ever known. But in his ninth decade, with his only grandson in apparent peril, was he going to start doing a deep dive to check out the legitimacy of all this? Was he going to violate the gag order and call his beloved daughter, Denise, to ask her what she thought? ‘Mr. Whitford’ called Ed Willi on Denise’s birthday.
No, Ed wasn’t going to call anyone.
He sent the 10K, as instructed, in an overnight UPS envelope to a ‘Mrs. Flowers’ at an address in Owasso, Oklahoma, supplying ‘Mr. Whitford’ with the tracking number. Then ‘Mr. Whitford’ reached out again. He was working hard to get Sean out of trouble, but he needed to post an additional $50,000 bond. Again, Ed was instructed to not tell a soul, because the situation was extremely precarious. Ed took $50,000 out of a retirement account and sent it to the same ‘Mrs. Flowers’ at the same Owasso address. Ed never heard from ‘Mr. Whitford’ again. He never saw his $60,000 again, either.
It wasn’t until the following week that Ed told Denise what had happened.
“Dad, why didn’t you tell me right away?” she said.
“I was afraid something would happen to Sean,” he said.
Denise took her father to the local police station and gave a statement to police detailing the whole scam. The officer said that two other elderly Redding residents had been similarly swindled. One of the people lost $110,000. My father-in-law felt the same way I did after I played three-card monte – times about a million. He was ashamed. He was embarrassed. But the saddest part of it was that he was really never the same. Yes, he was still the generous, big-hearted, loyal father and grandfather he always was, but somehow getting scammed this way broke him. It was almost as if he could never forgive himself.
Sean and his Tata, Edward J. Willi Jr. - at Sean’s first visit to Yankee Stadium, circa 2000.
Ed was one of the most rabid Yankee fans you will ever find. He went to his first game at The Stadium in 1944, and we have his scorecard with names like Snuffy Stirnweiss and Frankie Crosetti to prove it. Fifty-five years later, Ed took Sean to his first Yankee game. Watching the Yankees together became one of their deepest connections. Edward J. Willi Jr. passed on June 25, 2018. We handed out Crackerjack and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the memorial service. Sean gave one of the eulogies. It was beautiful.
All too common, and I’m sorry this happened to Denise’s father. My own credit and debit cards have been breached a number of times - this last time just two weeks ago, with 20 WalMart transactions in a matter of minutes. Thankfully, the fraud protection is much better now and it’s resolved almost as quickly. I’m all for a friendly wager, or a bracket box. But definitely not a fan of online betting apps.