Misplaced Pages

#100899

80-447: (Redirected from Big Store ) Big store may refer to: Big store, an elaborate confidence trick: see List of confidence tricks The Big Store , 1941 Marx Bros film The Big Store (1973 film) , a 1973 French comedy film A large retail establishment, see Big-box store Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with

160-511: A casket -making company. He later became a casket maker and undertaker in White Oaks, New Mexico , where he lived quietly and died in 1896 at the age of 76. The story of the great hoax was featured in several television programs in the 1950s and 1960s. Marc Hamilton played investor Asbury Harpending (a colorful character known for numerous escapades) in the 1955 episode "A Killing in Diamonds" of

240-511: A diamond mine and produced a bag full of diamonds. They stored the diamonds in the vault of the Bank of California , founded by William Chapman Ralston . Prominent financiers convinced the "reluctant" Arnold and Slack to speak out on their find. The cousins offered to lead investigators to their field. Investors hired a mining engineer to examine the field. They planted their diamonds on a remote location in northwest Colorado Territory . They then led

320-449: A bottle filled with water and demand compensation. Asian tourists are often the primary target. Pèngcí is a scam originating in China in which scammers feign injury in traffic accidents in order to extort money from drivers. Scammers also may place ostensibly expensive, fragile items (usually porcelain) in places where they may easily be knocked over, allowing them to collect damages when

400-412: A cat (not particularly prized as a source of meat). If one buys the bag without looking inside it, the person has bought something of less value than was assumed, and has learned first-hand the lesson caveat emptor . "Buying a pig in a poke" has become a colloquial expression in many European languages, including English, for when someone buys something without examining it beforehand. In some regions

480-462: A correct prediction is lower at each step, and thus it seems more remarkable. The scam relies on selection bias and survivorship bias and is similar to publication bias (the file-drawer effect) in scientific publishing (whereby successful experiments are more likely to be published, rather than failures). Diamond hoax of 1872 In 1871, veteran prospectors and cousins Philip Arnold and John Slack traveled to San Francisco. They reported

560-568: A debt is actually owed and demand payment using a money transfer service like MoneyGram or Western Union with poor traceability and no chargeback protection. The underlying debt either does not exist, is not valid due to a statute of limitations or does not lawfully belong to the entity making the calls; in some cases, the victim is a target of identity theft . The scammers operate under multiple names, many of which are intended to be mistaken for official or government agencies. The fraudulent calls often originate from abroad; any money extorted

640-410: A fortune teller uses cold reading skills to detect that a client is genuinely troubled rather than merely seeking entertainment; or is a gambler complaining of bad luck . The fortune teller informs the mark that they are the victim of a curse , and that for a fee a spell can be cast to remove the curse. In Romany , this trick is called bujo ("bag") after one traditional format: the mark is told that

720-608: A highly optimistic report, which found its way into the press. Geologist Clarence King who had led a survey team that recently completed a Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel had a chance meeting with Janin on a train. King and his team were alarmed at the reports of such a prominent diamond field which their survey had not noted. King sent geologist Samuel Franklin Emmons and cartographer A. D. Wilson ahead to investigate, with King joining them soon after. Upon locating

800-538: A minor element of crime or some other misdeed. The mark is made to think that they will gain money by helping fraudsters get huge sums out of a country (the classic advance-fee fraud/Nigerian scam); hence a mark cannot go to the police without revealing that they planned to commit a crime themselves. In a twist on the Nigerian fraud scheme, the mark is told they are helping someone overseas collect debts from corporate clients. Large cheques stolen from businesses are mailed to

880-405: A pool of marks with number equal to a power of the number of outcomes, and divides the marks at each step into the corresponding number of groups, thus insuring that one group receives a correct prediction at each step. This requires a larger number of marks at the beginning, but fewer steps are required to gain the confidence of the marks who receive successful predictions, because the probability of

SECTION 10

#1732856203101

960-422: A receipt from a legitimate dry cleaner in the target city, duplicates it thousands of times, and sends it to every upscale eatery in town. An attached note claims a server in the victim's restaurant spilled food, coffee, wine or salad dressing on a diner's expensive suit of clothes, and demands reimbursement for dry cleaning costs. As the amount fraudulently claimed from each victim is relatively low, some will give

1040-407: A remarkable sequence of correct predictions, whereupon the scammer then offers these marks another prediction, this time for a fee. The next prediction is, of course, no better than a random guess, but the previous record of success makes it seem to the mark to be a prediction worth great value. For gambling propositions with more than two outcomes, for example in horse racing, the scammer begins with

1120-413: A series of harassing phone calls at all hours (often to the victim's workplace), attempting to obtain bank account numbers (allowing the account to be drained through direct withdrawal) or impersonating police (sometimes with caller ID spoofing ) to threaten the victim with arrest. Fake debt collectors often refuse to provide a legally required written "validation notice" of the debt, provide no evidence

1200-454: A significant appreciation of the currency would be required just to make their investment break even. The Noorseekee (нурсики) scam is a multiple-round variant of the gold brick scam which has entered Russian urban legends from unverifiable incidents during the Afghanistan conflict. The scam consists of multiple "seller" and "buyer" rounds, the sellers and buyers both being Soviet officers in

1280-410: A sporting event). One half receives a prediction that the stock price will rise (or a team will win, etc.), and the other half receives the opposite prediction. After the event occurs, the scammer repeats the process with the group that received a correct prediction, again dividing the group in half and sending each half new predictions. After several iterations, the "surviving" group of marks has received

1360-523: A tri-plex residential unit in Trump Tower , while legitimately owned, was three times the square footage that it had in reality. The lie was key to the grift because that "proof point" was also part of pressure campaigns on financial journalists working on lists of the wealthiest people. In the white van speaker scam , low-quality loudspeakers are sold—stereotypically from a white van—as expensive units that have been greatly discounted. The salesmen explain

1440-440: A wide variety of schemes in which insureds attempt to defraud their own insurance carriers, but when the victim is a private individual, the con artist tricks the mark into damaging, for example, the con artist's car, or injuring the con artist, in a manner that the con artist can later exaggerate. One relatively common scheme involves two cars, one for the con artist, and the other for the shill . The con artist will pull in front of

1520-431: Is a variation on the pig-in-a-poke scam using money instead of other goods like a pig. The mark, or victim, would respond to flyers circulated throughout the country by the scammers ("green goods men") which claimed to offer "genuine" counterfeit currency for sale. This currency was sometimes alleged to have been printed with stolen engraving plates. Victims, usually living outside major cities, would be enticed to travel to

1600-481: Is an establishment, usually a strip club or entertainment bar, typically one claiming to offer adult entertainment or bottle service , in which customers are tricked into paying money and receive poor, or no, goods or services in return. Typically, clip joints suggest the possibility of sex, charge excessively high prices for watered-down drinks, then eject customers when they become unwilling or unable to spend more money. The product or service may be illicit, offering

1680-572: Is buying a cat, hence the expression "gato por lebre" (in Portuguese ) or "gato por liebre" (in Spanish ). The Thai gem scam involves layers of con men and helpers who tell a tourist in Bangkok of an opportunity to earn money by buying duty-free jewelry and having it shipped back to the tourist's home country. The mark is driven around the city in a tuk-tuk operated by one of the con men, who ensures that

SECTION 20

#1732856203101

1760-421: Is free and the card is only for purposes of age verification. The scammer will aggressively push using the site instead of a more well-known service like Skype, Zoom, or Discord or using more rational ways to obtain age verification (such as asking to see a driver's license or passport ). Typically these sites charge a relatively low fee, often close to US$ 25–$ 50. After the fee has been paid the scammer vanishes and

1840-478: Is immediately taken out of the country. A bogus or dishonest law firm is a valuable tool to a scammer in various ways. It can send requests for upfront payments in relation to inheritances coming from unknown relatives, a form of advance fee fraud . It also makes an effective fraudulent collection agency, as victims fear having to pay their own counsel hundreds of dollars per hour to defend against frivolous, vexatious or completely unfounded claims. In some cases,

1920-434: Is sold to would-be investors with the belief that economic/financial circumstances will drastically increase the value of their investment. In fact there is no credible rationale or information to indicate that those circumstances will materialize or, if they do materialize, that they will have significant effect on the value of the currency. Moreover, the dealers sell currency to these investors at substantial mark-up such that

2000-412: Is to use laser-printed counterfeit cheques with the proper bank account numbers and payer information. This scam can be seen in the film The Spanish Prisoner . Persuasion fraud, when fraudsters persuade people only to target their money, is an old-fashioned type of fraud. A grandparent gets a call or e-mail from someone claiming to be their grandchild, saying that they are in trouble. For example,

2080-608: The pyramid scheme , the Ponzi scheme , and the matrix scheme . Victor Lustig , a con artist born in Austria-Hungary, designed and sold a "money box" which he claimed could print $ 100 bills using blank sheets of paper. A victim, sensing huge profits and untroubled by ethical implications, would buy the machine for a high price—from $ 25,000 to $ 102,000. Lustig stocked the machine with six to nine genuine $ 100 bills for demonstration purposes, but after that it produced only blank paper. By

2160-675: The syndicated western television series Death Valley Days . Vaughn Taylor played Harpending in a 1965 episode of the same series, "Raid on the San Francisco Mint," which was hosted by Ronald Reagan , who was cast in the starring role of banker William Chapman Ralston . Death Valley Days aired a third story devoted to the hoax, the 1968 episode "The Great Diamond Mines", with Philip Arnold played by Gavin MacLeod , John Slack by John Fiedler and Ralston by Tod Andrews . A first-season episode of Maverick (January 1958), "Diamond in

2240-504: The "buyers" would never be seen again, leaving the bazaar's merchants with truckloads of noorseekee and no means to sell them. Establishing new contacts with the Soviets would then reveal the noorseekee as worthless brass caps from Soviet gunships' unguided air-to-ground missile packs (нурсики derives from the diminutive of НУРС, i.e. н е у правляемый р акетный с наряд, or unguided missile). These caps were used during shipping and discarded when

2320-419: The "pig" in the phrase is replaced by "cat", referring to the bag's actual content, but the saying is otherwise identical. This is also said to be where the phrase " letting the cat out of the bag " comes from, although there may be other explanations. In Portuguese or Spanish speaking countries, the "pig" in the phrase is replaced by a hare or jackrabbit. A victim thinks he is buying a hare, when in reality he

2400-486: The "sellers" fulfilled the order and the merchants bought massive amounts (e.g. literal truckloads) of noorseekee expecting to make a large profit due to the size of the outstanding "order", regardless of the reduced per-unit profit and regardless of the high investment it demanded of them. The size of the final noorseekee order would usually exceed the bazaar's cash reserves, causing the merchants to access their savings and / or barter away stockpiled premium goods. Obviously,

2480-431: The "sellers" had demanded. The merchants, making easy profits, were thus much more enthusiastic toward the next "sellers". Noorseekee were small, stackable, reasonably durable, light-weight and would neither spoil nor rust, making the trade especially easy. This went on for several rounds to build trust, form messaging pathways and establish the noorseekee as a special ware or even a Soviet-specialized secondary currency. On

Big store - Misplaced Pages Continue

2560-560: The 1980s and the 2020s. The con relies upon the truth that commercial lending and insurance, despite third-party appraisals and due diligence research, are based ultimately on trust between lender and borrower. The function of the scam is simple -- the grifters generate phony documents that show the applicant borrower meets or exceeds capital liquidity requirements needed to qualify for multi-million-dollar financing or insurance. However, banks and insurance companies expect some documents in their business to be fraudulent. The difficult part of

2640-451: The Rough", was based on the hoax. The incident was also dramatized as "The Great Diamond Mountain" on the television series The Great Adventure in 1963. Arnold was played by John Fiedler , Slack by John McGiver , Ralston by Barry Sullivan , and con-breaking geologist Clarence King by J. D. Cannon . A mystery, The Dangerous Angel Affair by Clarence Budington Kelland , revolves around

2720-490: The TV series Leverage , the team salts a mine with coltan in order to run a con on two greedy and corrupt luminaries. The Spanish Prisoner scam—and its modern variant, the advance-fee scam or " Nigerian letter scam "—involves enlisting the mark to aid in retrieving some stolen money from its hiding place. The victim sometimes believes they can cheat the con artists out of their money, but anyone trying this has already fallen for

2800-400: The accident. Insurance carriers, who must spend money to fight even those claims they believe are fraudulent, frequently pay out thousands of dollars—a tiny amount to the carrier despite being a significant amount to an individual—to settle these claims instead of going to court. A variation of this scam occurs in countries where insurance premiums are generally tied to a bonus–malus rating:

2880-547: The appearance of a rich ore, thus "salting the mine". Examples include the diamond hoax of 1872 and the Bre-X gold fraud of the mid-1990s. This trick was featured in the HBO series Deadwood , when Al Swearengen and E. B. Farnum trick Brom Garret into believing gold is to be found on the claim Swearengen intends to sell him. This con was also featured in Sneaky Pete . In season 3 of

2960-438: The bag of money for a bag containing sawdust, green paper, or other worthless items. Victims would leave unaware of the switch, and were unwilling to report the crime, as attempting to purchase counterfeit currency was itself a crime and the victim accordingly risked arrest . Pig in a poke originated in the late Middle Ages . The con entails a sale of what is claimed to be a small pig, in a poke (bag). The bag actually contains

3040-401: The checks are forged or stolen and the con-artist never makes the trip: the hapless victim ends up with a large debt and an aching heart . This scam can be seen in the movie Nights of Cabiria . Variants of these employ bots or even live people who offer to go to live cam sites to video chat with the mark. The sites almost always require a credit card to be entered. The scammer insists the site

3120-467: The con artist will offer to avoid an insurance claim, settling instead for a cash compensation. Thus, the con artist is able to evade a professional damage assessment, and get an untraceable payment in exchange for sparing the mark the expenses of a lowered merit class. The melon drop is a scam similar to the Chinese version Pèngcí in which a scammer will cause an unsuspecting mark to bump into them, causing

3200-448: The con. The "sellers" initially offered a small amount of a mysterious item—small shiny gold-colored cups called "noorseekee"—at a prominent bazaar for cheap ("seller" round). The first "seller" round ended with a minor deal, as the merchants were traditionally expected to buy at least a sample of a new and unknown good "just in case". Then the "buyers" visited the same bazaar demanding any noorseekee available and credulously paying more than

3280-415: The country is gone forever. The traditional romance scam has now moved into Internet dating sites, gaining a new name of catfishing . The con actively cultivates a romantic relationship which often involves promises of marriage. However, after some time, it becomes evident that this Internet "sweetheart" is stuck in their home country, lacking the money to leave and therefore unable to be united with

Big store - Misplaced Pages Continue

3360-705: The country. The buyer would later discover that the ornament is made out of bone matter with no trace of ivory whatsoever. In twists on the Gold-Brick Scam and the False Documents Scam, in the Financial Condition Scam the con artist convinces the mark through purported objective evidence that con artist is wealthier than he is. The 'gold brick' the scammer sells is himself. The trick was common in Manhattan commercial banking and insurance circles between

3440-414: The creation of Web sites for the bogus brand, which usually sounds similar to that of a respected loudspeaker company. They will often place an ad for the speakers in the "For sale" Classifieds of the local newspaper, at the exorbitant price, and then show the mark a copy of this ad to "verify" their worth. A "trade show" variation of a similar scam might involve a scammer pretending to have car troubles on

3520-435: The curse is in their money; they bring money in a bag to have the spell cast over it, and leaves with a bag of worthless paper. Fear of this scam has been one justification for legislation that makes fortune-telling a crime. See the "Blessing Scam" below. This scam got a new lease on life in the electronic age with the virus hoax . Fake anti-virus software falsely claims that a computer is infected with viruses, and renders

3600-494: The dishonest lawyer is merely part of a larger fraudulent scheme. A real estate fraud may involve taking deposits for a project under construction where, in theory, the lawyer is holding the money in escrow , guarding down payments as trust fund assets until a real estate deal closes. When the project is never completed, investors seek their money back but find the supposed trust fund is empty, as both lawyer and real estate developer are fraudulent. Insurance fraud includes

3680-635: The engineer made his report, more businessmen expressed interest. They included banker Ralston, General George S. Dodge , Horace Greeley , Asbury Harpending , George McClellan , Baron von Rothschild , and Charles Tiffany of Tiffany and Co . The investors convinced the cousins to sell their interest for $ 660,000 ($ 16.8 million today) and formed the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company. They selected New York attorney Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow as legal representative. Barlow convinced them to add U.S. Congressman Benjamin F. Butler to

3760-492: The essential con by believing that the money is there to steal (see also Black money scam ). The classic Spanish Prisoner trick also contains an element of the romance scam (see below). Many con artists employ extra tricks to keep the victim from going to the police. A common ploy of investment scammers is to encourage a mark to use money concealed from tax authorities. The mark cannot go to the authorities without revealing that they have committed tax fraud . Many swindles involve

3840-534: The frontman's lavish lifestyle and profligate spending, and ensuring company "stores" where marks are fleeced have expensive-seeming "fits and finishes" (in reality, cheap carpet, tile, paint, countertops, lighting fixtures, etc.). In the Trump case, evidence in a trial at equity held in the Manhattan New York State Supreme Court showed that the operation had reported that one of its chief "stores,"

3920-479: The ground. Most of the gems were originally from South Africa. Arnold returned to his home in Elizabethtown, Kentucky , and became a successful businessman and banker. Diamond-company investors sued him, and he settled the cases for an undisclosed sum. Years later he died of pneumonia after he was wounded in a shootout with a rival banker. John Slack dropped from public view. He moved to St. Louis, where he owned

4000-546: The investors west from St. Louis, Missouri in June 1872. Arriving by train at the town of Rawlins , in the Wyoming Territory , they continued on horseback. But Arnold and Slack wanted to keep the exact location a secret, so they led the group on a confusing four-day journey through the countryside. The group finally reached a huge field with various gems on the ground. Tiffany's evaluated the stones as being worth $ 150,000. When

4080-419: The items are damaged. The Baltimore Stockbroker scam relies on mass-mailing or emailing. The scammer begins with a large pool of marks, numbering ideally a power of two such as 1024 (2 ). The scammer divides the pool into two halves, and sends all the members of each half a prediction about the future outcome of an event with a binary outcome (such as a stock price rising or falling, or the win/loss outcome of

SECTION 50

#1732856203101

4160-570: The legal staff. Barlow set up a New York corporation known as the Golconda Mining Company with capital stock of $ 10,000,000, while Butler was given one thousand shares for amending the General Mining Act of 1872 to include the terms “valuable mineral deposits” in order to allow legal mining claims in the diamond fields. The U.S. Attorney General , George H. Williams issued an opinion on August 31, 1872, specifically stating that

4240-421: The location of the green goods men to complete the transaction. Victims were guided by a " steerer " to be shown large amounts of genuine currency—represented to be counterfeit—which was then placed in a bag or satchel . Victims then received offers to purchase the money at a price much less than face value. While a victim negotiated a price or was otherwise distracted, another accomplice (the "ringer") would switch

4320-527: The machine inoperable with bogus warnings unless blackmail is paid. In the Datalink Computer Services incident, a mark was fleeced of several million dollars by a firm that claimed that his computer was infected with viruses, and that the infection indicated an elaborate conspiracy against him on the Internet. The alleged scam lasted from August 2004 through October 2010 and is estimated to have cost

4400-567: The mark meets one helper after another, until the mark is persuaded to buy the jewelry from a store also operated by the swindlers. The gems are real but significantly overpriced. This scam has been operating for twenty years in Bangkok, and is said to be protected by Thai police and politicians. A similar scam usually runs in parallel for custom-made suits. Many tourists are hit by con men touting both goods. A similar trick in Thailand involves lying about

4480-435: The mark. The scam then becomes an advance-fee fraud or a check fraud . A wide variety of reasons can be offered for the trickster's lack of cash, but rather than just borrow the money from the victim (advance fee fraud), the con-artist normally declares that they have checks which the victim can cash on their behalf and remit the money via a non-reversible transfer service to help facilitate the trip ( check fraud ). Of course,

4560-474: The mark. These cheques are altered to reflect the mark's name, and the mark is then asked to cash them and transfer all but a percentage of the funds (their commission ) to the con artist. The cheques are often completely genuine, except that the "pay to" information has been expertly changed. This exposes the mark not only to enormous debt when the bank reclaims the money from their account, but also to criminal charges for money laundering . A more modern variation

4640-433: The missile packs were slotted into the gunships by the millions and were essentially worth nothing. The badger game extortion was perpetrated largely upon married men. The mark is deliberately coerced into a compromising position, a supposed affair for example, then threatened with public exposure of his acts unless blackmail money is paid. A mail fraud that is typically perpetrated on restaurateurs , this scheme takes

4720-843: The perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim is the "mark". Particular scams are mainly directed toward elderly people, as they may be gullible and sometimes inexperienced or insecure, especially when the scam involves modern technology such as computers and the internet. This list should not be considered complete but covers the most common examples. Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied; these include fake franchises , real estate "sure things", get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters , fortune tellers , quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals , foreign exchange fraud , Nigerian money scams , fraudulent treasure hunts , and charms and talismans . Variations include

4800-437: The police. An example is the "big screen TV in the back of the truck": the TV is touted as "hot" (stolen), so it will be sold for a very low price. The TV is in fact defective or broken; it may in fact not even be a television at all, since some scammers have discovered that a suitably decorated oven door will suffice. The buyer has no legal recourse without admitting to the attempted purchase of stolen goods . Iraqi currency

4880-447: The police. The first operator convinces the victim to pitch in hush money , which the two operators later split. A consumer inquires about a payday loan or short-term credit online and is asked for a long list of personal information. The lender is a shell firm; the loan might never be made, but the victim's personal information is now in the hands of scammers who sell it to a fraudulent collection agency. That agency then launches into

SECTION 60

#1732856203101

4960-444: The pre-final round the "buyers" emptied the bazaar's collective supply of noorseekee and left with the announcement of returning soon with an exorbitant amount of money, while leaving an equally exorbitant order for more noorseekee (and even a down-payment). The "sellers" gladly agreed to provide the demanded amount of wares, but demanded a higher per-unit price citing e.g. the need to pay more hush money to their commanding officers. Then

5040-508: The presence of ivory in ornaments. Tricksters offer a non-ivory ornament for sale next to a sign in English reading "It is strictly forbidden to transport ivory into the United States, and the seller assumes no responsibility". This may make the buyer believe he or she has stumbled upon "forbidden fruit", tempting him to purchase the ornament, usually small and easy to hide, and smuggle it out of

5120-542: The public sphere with purported soft evidence (in a version of the Salt the Mine scam ) of wealth — including feeding phony information to financial journalists (even through phony press agents) in order to have the front-man ranked highly on lists of the nation's wealthiest people. The listing is then used to "prove" that the frontman is financially liquid enough. Other tactics include placing phony items with tabloid gossip columns that note

5200-403: The same time they demonstrate that the trunk of their car is full of goods, which they claim have been taken from their just-dismantled company booth after the show. These goods are typically compact popular items like electronics or power tools. They offer these items to the mark at a "significantly reduced" price, allegedly just to raise some local cash in order to "get to the airport". (Sometimes

5280-472: The scam is to do many other things over long years that imbue the con artist and the documents he generates with an aura of wealth around the frontman. In the case of the Trump Organization , the phony financial documents were provided first to independent auditors who themselves then generated third-party documents based on those false representations. Meanwhile, much time and energy goes into "salting"

5360-414: The scammer may claim to have been arrested and require money wired, or gift cards purchased for bail, and asks the victim not to tell the grandchild's parents, as they would "only get upset". The call is fraudulent impersonation, the name of the grandchild typically obtained from social media postings as well as obituaries listed either in newspapers or from a funeral home's website. Any money wired out of

5440-452: The scammer to drop an item of alleged value. The scam originally targeted Japanese tourists due to the high price of honeymelon (cantaloupe) in Japan. The scammer may receive upwards of $ 100 for "compensation". The scam has also been called broken glasses scam or broken bottle scam where the scammer will pretend the mark broke a pair of expensive glasses or use a bottle of cheap wine, liquor or

5520-585: The scammer tries to sell a valuable personal jewelry item, like a gold ring off his finger.) In most cases the items are technically genuine, but worth incomparably less than what the scammer attempts to sell them for. In a well-prepared version of this scam the scammer is often a true foreigner, speaking with genuine accent and possessing good mastery of their respective foreign language. People shopping for bootleg software , illegal pornographic images, bootleg music, drugs, firearms or other forbidden or controlled goods may be legally hindered from reporting swindles to

5600-415: The scammers the benefit of the doubt, or simply seek to avoid the nuisance of further action, and pay the claim. The scam's return address is a drop box; the rest of the contact information is fictional or belongs to an innocent third party. The original dry cleaning shop, which has nothing to do with the scheme, receives multiple irate enquiries from victimised restaurateurs. A clip joint or "fleshpot"

5680-406: The side of a highway, trying to hail passing vehicles. When a good Samaritan pulls over, the person claims to be a foreign citizen visiting the country to participate in some local trade show. The person claims that they are about to leave the country after the show (e.g., are on their way to the airport), but their car has run out of fuel and they have no local currency to refill it or hire a taxi. At

5760-457: The site ceases to exist shortly thereafter. This is common on quick dating sites like Tinder or free ones like OkCupid , but has been seen on ones that require payment as well. In some cases, an online dating site is itself engaged in fraud , posting profiles of fictional persons or persons which the operator knows are not currently looking for a date in the advertised locality. One traditional swindle involves fortune-telling . In this scam,

5840-448: The site, they quickly concluded that it had been salted (as a geologist, King was aware that the various stones formed under different conditions and would never be found together in a single deposit), and notified investors. Further investigation showed Arnold and Slack bought cheap cast-off diamonds, refuse of gem cutting , in London and Amsterdam for $ 35,000 and scattered them to "salt"

5920-482: The terms “valuable mineral deposits” included diamonds. Financiers sent mining engineer Henry Janin, who bought stock in the company, to evaluate the find. Arnold and Slack led him and a group of investors to just north of what is now called Diamond Peak in the remote northwest corner of the Colorado Territory, where Janin and the investors found enough diamonds in the soil to satisfy themselves. Janin submitted

6000-412: The time victims realized that they had been scammed, Lustig was long gone. Salting or "salting the mine" are terms for a scam in which gemstones or gold ore are planted in a mine or on the landscape, duping the mark into purchasing shares in a worthless or non-existent mining company. During gold rushes , scammers would load shotguns with gold dust and shoot into the sides of the mine to give

6080-616: The title Big store . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_store&oldid=849280808 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages List of confidence tricks Scams and confidence tricks are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list,

6160-425: The ultra-low price in a number of ways; for instance, that their employer is unaware of having ordered too many speakers, so they are sneakily selling the excess behind the boss's back. The "speakermen" are ready to be haggled down to a seemingly minuscule price, because the speakers they are selling, while usually functional, actually cost only a tiny fraction of their "list price" to manufacture. The scam may extend to

6240-417: The victim $ 6–20 million. Gold brick scams involve selling a tangible item for more than it is worth; they are named for the scam of selling the victim an allegedly golden ingot which turns out to be gold-coated lead. The green goods scam , also known as the "green goods game", was a scheme popular in the 19th-century United States in which people were duped into paying for worthless counterfeit money. It

6320-433: The victim no recourse through official or legal channels. Also called a coin smack or smack game , two operators trick a victim during a game where coins are matched. One operator begins the game with the victim, then the second joins in. When the second operator leaves briefly, the first colludes with the victim to cheat the second operator. After rejoining the game, the second operator, angry at "losing," threatens to call

6400-404: The victim, and the shill will pull in front of the con artist before slowing down. The con artist will then slam on his brakes to "avoid" the shill, causing the victim to rear-end the con artist. The shill will accelerate away, leaving the scene. The con artist will then claim various exaggerated injuries in an attempt to collect from the victim's insurance carrier despite having intentionally caused

#100899