“There’s a sucker born every minute.”---P.T. Barnum
“Make that TEN suckers.”---W.T. Killeen
Donald Trump is just the latest in a recent line of neo-carnival shucksters laying the con on the criminally naive American public. His extraordinary success, however, has made us indelibly aware the boys are back in town, the genre is experiencing a rising tide and the end is not in sight. But who started this ugly business, what evil genius first sold us a bill of damaged goods? Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear and a man named Clark Stanley.
The First Snake Oil Salesman
The origin of the curious term dates back to the California Gold Rush when Chinese immigrants arrived to seek their fortunes as indentured labor for the Transcontinental Railroad. Among the medicines they brought along was snake oil made from the mildly venomous Chinese water snake. The oil was rich in omega-3 acids and was said to reduce inflammation from arthritis, bursitis and sore muscles caused by hewing granite to make way for the rail lines. It was so effective, the medicine found a wide market in the United States and its wonders were greatly exaggerated, first and foremost by one Clark Stanley, who slit open snakes and boiled them at the 1893 World’s Exposition in Chicago. He told the story of an ancient Hopi remedy learned by cowboys as he skimmed fat from the roiling water. As time went on, Stanley had many imitators, selling concoctions of all descriptions.
In 1917, Clark Stanley was prosecuted and fined under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 for selling patent medicine that contained only mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine, and “snake oil” became a synonym for fraud and fakery in popular culture.
Even before Stanley, however, newspapers carried ads on their front pages for Needham’s Red Clover Blossoms & Extracts, which was said to cure cancer, rheumatism, all blood diseases, dyspepsia, liver ailments, piles, kidney disease and a partridge in a prune tree. Oh yeah, it also regulated the bowels and purified the complexion. We haven’t been able to find any lately, alas, and the scary piles season is almost upon us.
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The Con Man Hall Of Fame
Throughout history, con artists have wreaked havoc on many a man. Evil geniuses like Gregor MacGregor and Victor Lustig come to mind for pulling off astounding schemes. Lustig actually sold the Eiffel Tower (twice!). MacGregor, a Scot born in the late 1700s, put together a scam which included inventing an entirely false country in what is modern-day Honduras and convincing investors to hand over capital to exploit the natural resources found in “Poyais,” the fake nation where he just happened to be a prince.
In latter times, Lou Pearlman, the driving force behind the Backstreet Boys, went on to perpetrate a $300 million Ponzi scheme that essentially saw him taking suckers’ money, promising to invest it at a high return, then simply spending it on himself. That little dandy earned Pearlman a 25-year prison sentence, though he was given the opportunity to knock a month off the sentence for every million he was able to recover.
Charles Ponzi, the Original Schemer (and isn’t it nice to have something named after you?), was born in Italy but died in Brazil, which tells you something already. Back in the early 1900s, he turned a nifty profit buying postage stamps in one country and then selling them for profit in another. Profitable or not, it was a slow slog through a dense bog and Charlie moved on to better things. Ponzi eventually happened upon the Wonderful World of Investors, bilking the lot of them for $20 million and destroying six banks.
Basically, the Ponzi scheme is a fraud that lures fleets of investors, paying off the old ones with funds from the new. The investors are led to believe the profits are coming from legitimate business activity. The scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as new investors continue to contribute new funds and most of the investors do not demand full payment.
Ponzi’s $20 million haul would amount to $196 million in 2022 dollars, a piffling amount compared to Bernie Madoff’s colossal swindle which collapsed in 2008. Bernie nailed the boys for about $18 billion, about 53 times the losses of Ponzi’s investors. Charlie gets naming rights, though, because he thought it up.
It's Only A Paper Moon
Dennis Hope is peddling property on the Moon, and it’s a seller’s market. Laugh if you like but over the past 32 years Mr. Hope has salted away more then 10 million dollars. That’s not soggy gingerbread. See, back in 1980, the former ventriloquist and car salesman was out of work, going through a divorce and struggling to make ends meet. Driving along, forlornly wondering what he might do for cash flow, Dennis looked through his car window and saw the Moon. “Now there’s a mess of real estate,” he thought. A brilliant idea popped into his head….a potential business with no competition. Dennis Hope would sell lots on the Moon.
Hope did some research and discovered the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, a pact in which dozens of nations including the U.S. laid out the basic legal guidelines for dealing with celestial bodies. Dennis thought he saw a loophole. The treaty declares that no nation can assert sovereignty over the Moon, but it fails to say clearly that individuals can’t.
Encouraged, Hope sent a note to the United Nations laying claim to the Moon as well as the other planets and moons in our solar system. Then he put out his realtor shingle under the moniker Lunar Embassy, selling a typical Moon acre for the bargain price of $24.99. (If you want a real bargain, the entire planet of Pluto is going for $250,000, though it probably fails the “location, location, location” test.) Hope’s claims of a $10 million windfall from land sales seems inflated, but who knows? Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Oh, and always take pause when you run into someone described as a “former ventriloquist.”
Scams ‘R’ Us
Cons are many and varied and crimes of this nature have been taking place for hundreds of years. In 1871, two miners tricked Tiffany’s into buying a fortune in fake diamonds by leading representatives of the jewelry giant on a four-day expedition to a field they had littered with faux gems. The Tiffany men thought they got the best of these naive goobers, offering the dumb miners $600,000. Breakfast at Tiffany’s wasn’t all tea and crumpets when the truth finally came out.
Five rabbis, three New Jersey mayors and two state legislators were arrested by the FBI at the end of a two-year investigation into a massive corruption scandal spanning from New York to Israel. The rabbis were charged with laundering tens of millions of dollars through charities in both countries and one suspect was accused of selling Israeli donors’ kidneys purchased for $10,000 for up to $160,000. Worshippers were praying when federal agents stormed the Deal Synagogue in Long Branch, New Jersey and seemed flabbergasted by the charges. “Such meshuggeneh!” said one of the templegoers. “Even on the black market you can get a kidney for eighty thousand.”
GoFundMe scams are too numerous to mention, raking in numberless good-hearted suckers every week. Since GFM’s founding in 2010, about 250,000 campaigns have been launched just to pay for “health care costs.” That’s a full third of the site’s total campaigns, raising over $650 million in contributions. It’s anybody’s guess how many of these are phonies, but there’s no shortage of criminal intent. Last year, the mastermind of an elaborate GFM scheme which duped thousands of victims out of more than $400,000 was hit with a 16-count federal indictment a month after pleading guilty to state charges stemming from the hoax involving his ex-girlfriend and a homeless veteran.
Mark D’Amico of New Jersey was indicted for a raft of charges connected to a 2017 scheme which conned contributors into believing homeless vet John Bobbit Jr. gave D’Amico’s then-girlfriend Katelyn McClure his last $20 when she ran out of gas on a darkened freeway off-ramp in Philadelphia. The rewards for Bobbit’s alleged selfless act poured in as D’Amico’s marks supposedly rewarded man’s humanity to man. “This clown bought himself a goddam BMW with some of the proceeds!” said an unidentified federal investigator. “He bought his girlfriend luxury handbags.”
Good news, though. GoFundMe, suffering a tidal wave of bad publicity, eventually returned all the donations to the people who were duped. Don’t expect that to happen every time.
The Internet Evildoers Meet The Avengers
The computer era has opened up a whole new world to scammers of every description. Lonelygirl15, allegedly a teenager named Bree, turned out to be an actress named Jessica Rose. This YouTube sensation broke many lonely hearts who thought they shared a special connection with the webcam princess.
Online Dating Scams, of course, are a staple of the industry. Shysters construct fake profiles, try to get the marks to fall for them, then slowly reel them in. They often profess love at an unusually early point and try to get their fish to chat on alternative apps, the better to be not shut down by the dating app. The scammers will eventually ask the newly beloved to cover the cost of something, perhaps a plane ticket they’ll need to come visit you. After that, it’s “See you later, sucker!”
And how about them Nijerians? Scamming is a cottage industry in the capital, Abuja, where some of the leading fraudsters have earned celebrity status. There’s even a rap song called “Yahooze” about the perpetrators by local singer Olu Maintain with more than 3 million hits on YouTube.
This is not all bad for clever phonies like London-based comedian James Veitch with not much to do. “I set up multiple pseudonymous email accounts and began replying to these guys,” says Veitch. “I must have gotten on some sort of sucker list because the Nijerian Prince emails started arriving in torrents. I’ve been replying as much as I can but it’s challenging.” James eventually wrote a book compiling some of his more entertaining transactions, one of them involving a Nijerian man who professed to have “cancer of the lever.” Vietch sympathized, saying “I’m so sorry to hear of this. Cancer of the lever can be deadly. Are you sure it’s your lever, though, and not your second wife poisoning you? Make sure you check your food before you eat it.” John’s book is available on Amazon and his funds are still in his pocket.
Decent Exposure
Robocalls are rampant and more than 40% of them are likely scams. Last year, Microsoft discovered that more than 60% of the population of 16 countries including the U.S. were targeted in tech support scams. This incurred the scary wrath of an online activist with the secret identity “Jim Browning.” Browning likes to go after scammers in India who make robocalls advancing a computer repair scheme. He plays the victim, listening to scammers tell him they need access to his computer so they can give him a refund.
"These guys will typically use a phrase like 'We are a computer company going out of business. You paid us in the past and we're going to refund your money,'" Browning explained. He lets them into his computer, but they fail to realize Jim now has access to their computer and can spy on their operations. Once in, he watches them, listens to them, and worms his way into their systems, where he can cause untold havoc, and does. Browning's strategy for dealing with these crooks has proved popular on YouTube where one of his videos has garnered over two million views.
An unnamed Canadian man received a call from an alleged “tax officer” telling him he was implicated in a fraud. If he didn’t call back immediately, he was facing jail time. The victim, however, knew the Canada Revenue Agency was based in Ottawa and only contacted people by mail.
“So I called back and asked for their address. They wanted to know why and I explained I wanted to pay my debt in person. They hung up, of course.” But the would-be mark wasn’t through with his new pals. He now calls them daily, about 15-20 times a day. “They keep asking for my name and hanging up. I get three different Indian guys answering in what sounds like a call center. I keep calling and letting them know I’d love to visit. After awhile, that started begging me to stop calling. I reminded them they had insisted I call and I was doing just that. I have nothing better to do. I’ve started calling them every 15 minutes and I think I’ll keep it up for another two weeks. It’s really fun. They sound so defeated.”
Our heroes come in all shapes and sizes.
That's all, folks....
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
