Peter Popoff made me a criminal

[Joey McGee]

When my wife taught science she had a lot of fun teaching it from that point of view. She likes stories and everyone will remember a good story more than a set of rules that resulted from the story.

I like this a lot. Not only does it work to think of education like this, but it also agrees with what we know about human nature and the psychology of education. Like explaining nature in terms of atoms, telling stories about how nature works as a strategy can't be improved upon in any fundamental way!

 

[pharphis]

I am astounded that I knew next to nothing about the tenants of skepticism after graduating from high school. All they would have had to do was teach the history of science, why people thought that the earth was at the center of the universe, and how it was proven it was not for example. Cognitive bias. All of this was known, I learned basically nothing about it. Oh I learned about stereotypes in social studies... nothing about why humans are naturally biased in this way. If they simply stuck to showing how science works, this would go a long way. This is by design, it's illiberal to question the very intuitions of people. This is my opinion YMMV.

I'm in the same boat, I think. If it wasn't for a perverse interest in watching popoff infomercials at 4 AM with a friend during high school, I never would have discovered Randi and then I don't think I would have discovered skepticism itself, unless by luck via atheism-related content. . . . and this is coming from someone in science!

 

[Puppycow]

Fishers of (gullible) men.

Cast a big enough net and you're bound to catch something.

What is infuriating is that they like to prey on old people suffering from dementia who can no longer think clearly. Or people who never had that capacity to begin with.

I do remember when I was a young kid being fooled by one of those pieces of junk mail that appears to say we've won a sweepstakes and are going to be millionaires. I was the first one to arrive home that day from school and I brought in the mail and there was this thing in there. I was elated for a couple hours, I couldn't wait to breathlessly tell my mom when she got home that we were about to all become wealthy. She was not fooled though and patiently explained to me that we hadn't really won anything. It took me a while to be convinced because I had already moved on to fantasies about what the money was going to buy us.

 

[Maurice Ledifficile]

Somehow there are certain concepts that people repeatedly buy into automatically, whereas even a moment of logical thought would send them running. Not surprisingly con men know of and use these psychological quirks a lot. The "seed money" concept is and has been a very popular one. A very common racket, at least in the recent past, was the con man coming up to the "mark" and claiming to have discovered some money in the street. For some reason the con man offered to share it with the mark, but only if the mark provided some of their own money as "good faith" while the con man went to the bank to split the found money. Of course the con man ends up with all the money. But why, if one thinks of it, is there any need for "good faith" money at all? Similarly, con men would sell people machines that "print real currency" because the con man "needed some quick cash." ???

There must be some subroutine still in our brains that somehow worked in neolithic society (hunting wooly mammoths?) but in current day society convinces us in a bizarre way that these things make some sort of logical sense and that we should thereby give away our cash.

[In a classic pigeon drop, the "good faith" money is given to one of the men going to "find" the original owner. The pigeon gives one of the men whatever he can muster as insurance, and feels safe because he has the envelope with the big money (by this time the pigeon is holding an envelope full of money-sized magazine cutouts).]


Totally ninjaed by Sherman Bay

 

[Joey McGee]

I'm in the same boat, I think.

Me and you are in a slightly different boat. It it wasn't for randi, I'd be a crazy woo. I'm 100% correct and serious. I first wrote randi in the early 2000s telling him how much of a piece of **** he was for denying people the peace of knowing their relatives were communicating with their correspondents on earth. He ended with "enjoy your delusions" in response to my pro psychic arguments (that lasted several months and were often fueled by drugs and alcohol (as my current posts are)). Well, James, I didn't enjoy those delusions. And here I stand today (sturdied, by scotch) BECAUSE that email thread pissed me off that much I set out to prove him wrong. Yes. Thank you James.

If it wasn't for a perverse interest in watching popoff infomercials at 4 AM with a friend during high school, I never would have discovered Randi and then I don't think I would have discovered skepticism itself, unless by luck via atheism-related content. . . . and this is coming from someone in science![

I often think of a man who has made it through the intense battles of science and come out a stupid believer, Francis Collins. An exception doesn't make a rule.

****.

We must provide an extra bit about making your beliefs coherent.

 

[steve s]

This scheme works best with 3 players; the mark and 2 con men, but the mark thinks one of the con men is on his side and the two cons don't know each other.

This is well played in an excellent movie that shows several other cons, the [url="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061678/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1]Flim-Flan Man[/url], with George C. Scott and Michael Sarazin (the cons) and Slim Pickens (the mark).

That same basic scam was used in The Sting, except for the part about the check.

Steve S

 

[pgwenthold]

Somehow there are certain concepts that people repeatedly buy into automatically, whereas even a moment of logical thought would send them running. Not surprisingly con men know of and use these psychological quirks a lot. The "seed money" concept is and has been a very popular one. A very common racket, at least in the recent past, was the con man coming up to the "mark" and claiming to have discovered some money in the street. For some reason the con man offered to share it with the mark, but only if the mark provided some of their own money as "good faith" while the con man went to the bank to split the found money. Of course the con man ends up with all the money. But why, if one thinks of it, is there any need for "good faith" money at all? Similarly, con men would sell people machines that "print real currency" because the con man "needed some quick cash." ???

There must be some subroutine still in our brains that somehow worked in neolithic society (hunting wooly mammoths?) but in current day society convinces us in a bizarre way that these things make some sort of logical sense and that we should thereby give away our cash.

My favorite scam was the guys in Canada who were selling phony life insurance. They were, of course, scamming the elderly. But the approach was:

Send cash. To Canada.

But even better:

Don't send it directly, because it will be stolen by customs. Instead, you should hide it in the pages of magazines.

So given the instructions to send cash, hidden in the pages of magazines to avoid being found by customs, people actually sent them millions of dollars altogether.

 

[Bikewer]

My idea was to show all high-school students "The Sting" at some point, as they cover most all the classic cons in that film.... A bit of discussion afterwords could fill in the rest.

The classics still work. One of our students fell for the classic "pigeon drop" some years back. A city police officer found the lad standing at the local Amtrack station, holding a poorly-wrapped box. He told the officer he was waiting for the guy to come back from the bank so they could split the money....

We also had a lad selling a "secret code" (this was before cell-phone popularity) which when entered into a phone would allow free long-distance calling. He gave the "marks" a receipt consisting of a torn-off piece of yellow legal-pad paper.
Sold a bunch of them, he did.....

More involved.... I was standing around campus one day when a very agitated young Asian lad approached, talking on his cell phone all the while. He was gesturing frantically....Making writing motions.
I handed him my notebook and he scribbled something about his brother being held for money....All the while talking to whoever was on the phone.
We went back and forth for a few minutes and I was able to determine that he was being victimized by the "your brother has been involved in an accident and we need 500 dollars to let him go!" scam.
I told him..."Hang up on the grifters and call your brother." He seemed shocked, but eventually complied... His brother was, of course fine.
People fall for this all the time. Usually, they prey on foreigners or the elderly. "Your grandson is being held for (insert crime here) and we need 500 dollars right now to let him go!"
Often the panicked individual will transfer the money. Sometimes, the caller will actually claim to be the grandson....Preying on the victim's poor hearing and possible dementia.

 

[Ladewig]

Imagine several f-bombs placed here.

I just saw the latest Peter Popoff Miracle Spring Water commercial. He finally found a way around the FDA. and FTC. He says the Miracle Spring Water will help you with Miracle Health and Miracle Power.

ETA
I just went to his website

[insert angry invective here]

 

[Norman Alexander]

Imagine several f-bombs placed here.

I just saw the latest Peter Popoff Miracle Spring Water commercial. He finally found a way around the FDA. and FTC. He says the Miracle Spring Water will help you with Miracle Health and Miracle Power.

ETA
I just went to his website

[insert angry invective here]

Offer to buy every last blessed bottle, packet and item he has. Say they can be shipped receiver-pays. Give him the address but not the name of a local refuse/recycling centre. If anything does get sent, the receivers certainly won't pay and it won't be taken back by the shippers. So it will get dumped at his expense.

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

Today I got a piece of mail addresses to the new person from Peter Popoff and my curiosity overcame my sense of right and wrong. Upon reading the mail I realized that the devil made me do it. And I'm fairly certain Peter Popoff is the devil.

I'm predicting you're going straight to the Polunsky Unit unless you send me $200.

 

[Ladewig]

Offer to buy every last blessed bottle, packet and item he has. Say they can be shipped receiver-pays. Give him the address but not the name of a local refuse/recycling centre. If anything does get sent, the receivers certainly won't pay and it won't be taken back by the shippers. So it will get dumped at his expense.

I suspect someone who has spent his whole life peddling BS is not going to fall for something like that. And even if he did, he is selling tiny packets of water. If his entire inventory were stolen, then in a couple of days he would be back up to full steam. Furthermore, I suspect that even if you did get him to send out his entire inventory, he would go on TV, claim that the fruits of his labor were stolen, and then, Because of his followers' sympathy, his average daily take would increase for a period of time.

Plus it is hard to overestimate his followers' willingness to believe. You could provide a video recording of Popoff admitting that it is all a racket, and there would still be people willing to send him money. Once you get someone to believe in miracles, it is very, very hard to get them to not believe in miracles.

From my perspective, the only people lower than the Popoffs of the world are those that pretend to talk to dead people in order to fleece grieving parents and spouses.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Once you get someone to believe in miracles, it is very, very hard to get them to not believe in miracles.

This is so true. I have a delusional family member and it is so hard to talk to other people about their delusions. "But can't you just show them?" No, there is nothing you can do to un-delude someone who has wrapped their very being about their delusion.