I just dispensed with a real-life con artist like this. Claimed to be a mechanic, down on his luck husband of my wife's home town acquaintance. So we let him work on a vehicle while I was expediting for this mine.
Ten hours. He was over on three days. He made absolutely no progress, in fact he damaged some things trying to install this new engine I bought for my wife in her favorite car. I got the whole thing done in 5.3 hours myself, just finished it.
He did not put on a single bolt. Could not even figure out how to mount the engine to the transmission. That was 50 minutes for me and I don't consider myself a mechanic.
For three days he put on this act. Playing loud music in the shop and bustling around whenever someone was outside to see him. Pretending to be exhausted, coming in with the manual to put a show on for the wives like he was doing something. Asking my wife to come find bolts he said were missing - what the hell do the wives know about engine bolts. The bolts he says were missing were the bolts he had in his hands the day before I left.
It' just amazing someone would put on this kind of act! It works with someone who has zero knowledge of mechanics, his wife, but how can you do this to her? But even my wife, I took her out and showed her - she was immediately stunned and disgusted. He was saying to them that all I had to do was put some bolts on and it was ready to go. With no alternator, radiators, fans, electronics, battery, hoses, starter, power steering, air con, exhaust, EGR, etc. nothing at all hooked up because it isn't even all the way under the hood. Just hanging there on the hoist uninstalled. I just sowed my wife and it was so crazy you have to see it to believe a guy claimed he worked ten hours to move an engine five feet.
I had her stay there through the 50 minutes it took to mount the engine after I replaced the damaged transmission seal. I did more in 50 minutes than he did in ten hours over three days.
It is hard to believe people will put on these kinds of acts - that they have no shame about it - but they do exist.
The thing that fascinates me is the Dark Triad psychology. This guy knows before he even comes over the first day that he's going to act, hour after hour, like he is doing something. He knows that when I get back that I am going to see he accomplished absolutely nothing but damaging things, so he's already planning on staging his exit. He's going to say ****-you on the phone and hang up on me when I ask for an invoice with each completed task and time billed for it.
When he did the "**** you" and hung up, it was so odd because on my end of the phone I was being real calm and polite despite him trying effectively to steal money. An invoice is a customary practice for mechanic work, and that's how they are laid out: Parts, labor, services rendered. You would not hang up on a person for requesting an invoice.
He just said ten hours upon my first inquiry, and how I was such a good friend it was going to be 45% off his normal hourly rate. His wife is listening to this conversation, so the reality for her is what a great guy he is. I asked for an itemized invoice and suggested his hours were frankly absurd. He hadn't even got started.
So why would you say "**** you" to that and hang up? Because you are being asked to produce evidence. Just ordinary, customary evidence. The wife, the victim of this manipulative abuse - she is living in an alternate reality where her husband is screwed again and again by everyone. She believes he is a good husband, a good person, not an unemployed Dark Triad. You have no scruples to do this to people. No conscience.
It's the same personality types that are self-selected into bigfoot, but most especially into the fraud level like Area X. Tax fraud as well as false pretenses with the donations.
The next venture of this guy - he told me about it while we were looking over the engine. He's going gold mining. He has a black powder recipe, for digging. Gonna go out on his four-wheeler, and while camping he is going to set a perimeter of wires that will set off black powder charges to kill the bears. He took his wife out to a camp ground and set off a charge so she could see for herself how bona-fide this new business is. She's the one paying for the four-wheeler.
So that's interesting because I was leaving to expedite for a real mine, and not that I needed to learn any of this but it's all the heavy equipment, the dirt processing components, the pumps and fuel, etc. You have to go down to the DNR and file a claim before you start blowing stuff up in the woods. Even a prospecting site needs to file a claim. You check to see where the existing claims are to find open ground before you just march off into the woods.
To a knowledgeable skeptic, these Area X people are every bit as idiotic. They have not done the first thing in terms of wildlife, by contacting the wildlife managers of the land they're supposedly preserving wildlife habitat upon. Going mining without even a mining claim. Preserving habitat without a square inch of land to preserve anything on.
The private Area X cabin: how are they preserving the bigfoot there? They claimed to be trying to shoot them, and as evidence they fired recklessly about. On the public land around there - a procedure already exists for nominations of either species or habitat. They've never done it.
I am a naive and trusting person to a fault but this mechanic/miner guy was full of ****. Playing an alternate reality game. I should have heard enough, but it was attended with the victim card. We got introduced to them as a charity case, people that needed help. Didn't even have the money for gas to come out. So I filled their tank and gave $50 up front for survival groceries. He was saying how suicidal he was, not being able to work, and this mining play might be his last try. So I didn't say anything like "you're full of ****."
Before I got back his wife was calling my wife from the pharmacy, getting his insulin, couldn't she just give her credit card number to the attendant because my wife knew how much he had been working on the engine. She was smart enough not to, despite this really underhanded "you owe us and we don't have the money for his insulin" guilt-tripping.
As far as I know, this was Sharon's first Alternate Reality play, and she probably didn't think through what you have to do with normal, reasonable people who ask you for the evidence. You have to make them out to be really unreasonable people, lie about what people can see with their own two eyes, and get nasty. Underhanded.
A practiced woo gamer has a lot of experience with this. Brian Brown was here, and same thing: we're bad people. Now we're bad people for Sharon because we asked for evidence. Next time she does woo, like UFO's or the Loch Ness Monster, Faith Healing, or whatever then she's already got the exit down. Perhaps she can sharpen up the tools, being a little more cunning and cool with framing reasonable people as unreasonable.
Those are not skills I want to develop.
