The Art of Stealing Hearts — A Lineage of Confidence Tricksters

Until now, we have looked at frauds whose very mechanism promises collapse — the Ponzi scheme, which pays earlier investors with the money of later ones. Yet no matter how clever the mechanism, nothing begins until the first coin moves. And what draws out that ‘first coin’ is always the human heart. What we trace this time is a swindle that, rather than picking a lock, makes the other person open the door themselves — the lineage of the ‘confidence trick’: winning trust first, then exploiting it. The deceiver approaches not with violence but with a smile and a story. And many of those who were deceived say, afterward, the very same thing: I never met anyone so trustworthy.

‘Do You Have Confidence in Me?’ — The Birth of a Word

The very word that means confidence fraud was born from a single incident. The stage is New York in 1849. A well-dressed gentleman strikes up a friendly conversation with a stranger on the street, behaving as though they were old acquaintances. Judging the moment when his target has warmed to him, the man is said to have made his move: do you have enough confidence in me, he asked, to lend me your watch until tomorrow? Put on the spot, the other person finds it hard to say ‘no, I do not.’ Flattered in his pride, he hands over the watch. And the man vanished with it.

The arrested man, William Thompson, was branded by the newspapers of the day as the ‘confidence man.’ This, it is said, is the origin of the English terms ‘con man’ and ‘con artist’ for a swindler. Later the writer Herman Melville built a novel from the same idea, and this figure became a subject of literature as well.

Here, the whole essence of confidence fraud is distilled. Thompson did not seize the watch. He drew from his target’s own lips the words ‘I have confidence in you,’ and on the security of that confidence, had the watch ‘lent’ to him. The core of the art of deceit lies not in violence or threats but in turning a person’s goodwill and pride against them. This small incident, more than 171 years ago, vividly displayed the archetype.

Those Who Play a Role — The Temptation of Impersonation

One of the oldest ways to manufacture trust is to impersonate ‘someone you are not.’ A uniform, a title, a confident bearing — these work as signs of trust in themselves. Before the other person scrutinizes the figure before them, they first believe the sign.

A man often cited as the symbol of this psychology is Frank Abagnale. In 1960s America, from his teens, he claimed to have used forged checks and the like and impersonated pilots, doctors, and lawyers, and his life story became widely known through an autobiography and a film. In recent years, however, it has also been reported that this autobiography contains much exaggeration and that the actual scale of his crimes was far smaller. Ironically, if that is true, there is even a view that his greatest swindle was not the crimes themselves but making the world believe in the self-image of a ‘dazzling con artist.’

What we should see here is not an individual’s heroic tale. What matters is the structure: why did the people around him believe so readily? The people at the airport did not bother to doubt a young man in a pilot’s uniform. Because our society cannot function if we verify each person’s identity one by one, we use ‘signs’ such as titles and uniforms as shortcuts to trust. The swindler slips into the gaps of this social labor-saving. Impersonation, more than human malice, can be called an act that preys on the very machinery of a society built on the premise of trust.

A Trap in the Name of Love — The Structure of Marriage Fraud

Confidence fraud takes its cruelest form when it preys on human affection. Marriage fraud uses as its material not only money but the other person’s very emotions. Across all times and places, incidents of stripping someone of their property by dangling marriage or a relationship have been reported again and again; in recent years, police and consumer agencies in many countries warn that it has spread across borders as ‘romance fraud’ staged on the internet.

Why do even normally cautious people end up deceived? At work is a wholly natural function of the human heart: the wish to believe in and to love someone. Social psychology has pointed to tendencies that make people easy to move — ‘reciprocity,’ the urge to give back when shown kindness; ‘liking,’ the readiness to believe someone toward whom one feels affection; ‘authority,’ the readiness to accept the words of those in positions of power; and ‘social proof,’ the sense that something is right if many people are doing it. The confidence trickster is thought to stimulate these inclinations of the heart with skillful words.

Why Do People Come to Believe? — The Lesson as Structure

Tracing the history of confidence fraud, we notice that although the methods change shape with the times, the vital points of the heart they strike have barely changed at all. The whisper of ‘only you are special’; the urgency of ‘you must decide right now’; the reserve of ‘it would be rude to refuse’; the reassurance of ‘everyone is doing it.’ Every one of these is an emotion we cannot let go of in order to live our days comfortably.

If so, the key to defense is not to eliminate emotion. It is, rather, to know in advance under what conditions one’s own heart is easily moved. When money or personal information is involved and you feel strong affection, urgency, or special treatment — that may be a signal not to rush a judgment, but to stop for a moment and consult a trusted third party. What the long lineage of confidence fraud leaves us is not knowledge of specific methods, but the oldest and most reliable art of self-protection: ‘knowing how one’s own heart moves.’

A century and a half or so since Thompson swindled away that watch. The deceivers have moved their stage to the far side of a phone or a screen, but what they aim at, now as then, is the same place: the human heart. Next time, we move on to the history of how this ‘deceiving’ seeped out into the world of objects — the story of an endless contest over fakes made to resemble the real thing, namely counterfeit money and imitation goods.