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How Do Con Artists Fool People? They Listen.
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We tend to think con artists are smooth talkers and persuasive sellers, but listening is their most essential quality, says Maria Konnikova, who has written a new book on con artistry. Here she discusses the case of Victor Lustig, a Frenchman who sold the Eiffel Tower twice for scrap metal to two different buyers. Too embarrassed at being taken in, the buyers never reported Lustig.

As Konnikova explains, Lustig literally wrote the book the con artistry. In his work 10 Commandments of the Con Artist, Lustig writes that a con artist is a good listener, not a good talker. In other words, con artists are looking for your tell — your signal about who you are, what your desires are, what you fear, etc., so that they can promise you exactly the thing you want most.

Why aren't we alive to such an obvious tactic? Simply because we're not used to truly listening to people, says Konnikova, and so we're not accustomed to recognizing such genuine interactions. In our constant pursuit of doing more, more often, we lose depth, and that self-awareness is crucial when you're up against someone who wants to fleece you.

Our pattern of inattention has a dangerous double effect: when we notice that someone is finally, truly listening to us, we become more likely to open up and bear personal details that we wouldn't otherwise disclose. And that information is exactly what con artists are hoping to extract from you — then they'll sell you the moon, or the Eiffel Tower if you're in the scrap metal business.
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MARIA KONNIKOVA:
Maria Konnikova is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Confidence Game , winner of the 2016 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes , an Anthony and Agatha Award finalist. Her new book, The Biggest Bluff , will be out from Penguin Press on June 23, 2020. While researching The Biggest Bluff , Konnikova became an international poker champion and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings—and inadvertently turned into a professional poker player. She is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker , and her writing has been featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing and has been translated into over twenty languages. Maria also hosts the podcast The Grift from Panoply Media, a show that explores con artists and the lives they ruin, and is currently a visiting fellow at NYU's School of Journalism. She graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in psychology from Columbia University.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Konnikova: One of the things that con artists do incredibly well is actually read other people. So psychics, psychics are kind of the ultimate at this. They can read all of the cues that you're throwing off without realizing you're throwing them off, and so they seem psychic to you even though you're telling them everything — you're giving them everything that they need to go on. And the truth is most of us don't do that. Most of us really do not listen to other people.

Victor Lustig, who is one of the most famous con artists of the 20th century, who's nickname was Count Lustig and .......


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