It’s an interesting read, but the “grifter” strikes me as particularly low-level and the reporter woefully uneducated about con artists. It irked me to no end that the grifter referred to his scam as a “pigeon drop” when in fact the pigeon drop is a very different scam entirely. The pigeon drop involves dropping something of apparently high value and then getting the mark to pay off the con artist to get the property which turns out to be worthless - a classic is the “stamp collection” type scam, where the con man finds a stamp collection supposedly worth thousands, but can’t stay to collect the reward and he “sells” it to the mark for a few hundred bucks.
This just in: dude gets aspiring writer to pay him $75 for “an inside look” that seems to be derived heavily from the movie The Grifters.
…come to think of it, that is a pretty good scam. Hey, writers!
That’s pretty funny - I noticed the delay at the start of the story, with just enough time for a little research.
Or, in more modern terms, white van speakers.
Oh man - there was one summer in DC I got hit up by those guys almost every weekend, it seemed. I even devised an anti-pigeon-drop-pigeon-drop that I was going to pull on them. I totally forgot about that!
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