Product Description

Three Card Monte...AKA Texas Twist or Find The Lady The Set Up: - Cardboard box on a busy street - The dealer shuffles 3 cards - The onlooker bets the position The Lure: - Someone (the shill) always seems to be winning - The lookout signals the approach of cops - The roper seeks out marks - The muscle man takes care of complainers The Sting - The mark is persuaded to join the game: he never wins From the charming and seductive hustler to the cyberhack who can truly vanish without a trace, The Con Artists Handbook exposes all the tricks of the trade with a revealing look at: - Why the mark never sings - Anatomy of 29 scams from classics like the Pigeon Drop to the Information Age cons like credit card cloning - Scammer Hall of Fame with profiles of the most notorious and intriguing con men. The hand is quicker than the eye. Get wise to the con.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84647 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Joel Levy is a writer on science, psychology, history and the paranormal, and the author of several books, including: - Really Useful - the history and science of everyday things. - Secret History - hidden forces that shaped the past - Boost Your Brain Power - a guide to testing and improving your mental abilities, from memory and problem solving to creativity and emotional intelligence. - How 'Perfect' is Your Partner? - co-author of a comprehensive guide to testing whether you and your partner are compatible. - KISS Guide to the Unexplained - a beginner's guide to historical secrets and mysteries, the paranormal and supernatural. - Fabulous Creatures - about creatures of myth and folklore. - The Universe in Your Pocket - a pocket compendium of essential facts. - Technocreatures - a guide to the exciting new science of biomorphic and biomimetic robots - robots modelled on animals.

Excerpted from The Con Artist Handbook by Joel Levy. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Frank Abagnale Jr: Swinging through the 60s

Frank Abagnale Jr AKA Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams and Robert Monjo, was a prodigy in the world of con artists who had amassed a multi-million-dollar fortune, posed successfully as an airline pilot and slept with countless women throughout the world, all before the age of 21.

Between 1964 and 1969, Abagnale passed $2.5 million (£1.8 million) in fraudulent cheques in every state in America and 26 foreign countries besides. A high school drop-out with an IQ of 136, he successfully impersonated a doctor, an attorney (fabricating a Harvard law degree, but genuinely passing the Louisiana Bar Exam), a sociology professor at Brigham Young University, a stockbroker and even posed as an FBI agent. His notorious escapades as a pilot for Pan Am earned him the dubious title "The Skywayman".

Abagnale started his life of crime as a runaway kid aged just 16 (although being tall and prematurely grey he looked much older). Perhaps his first act of forgery was to change one of the numbers on his driver’s licence to make him seem 10 years older. He used fake ID to cash small cheques at hotels around New York, until one day he spotted a flight crew leaving a hotel. Attracted by their air of self-confidence and glamour, he decided on a new direction and quickly rounded up everything he needed to become a fake Pan Am airline pilot.

He posed as a pilot whose uniform had been stolen to get a "replacement" uniform; he posed as a small airline owner to get a printing firm to make him up a pilot’s ID as a "sample"; and he got a mail order certificate company to send him a framed pilot’s licence using fake information, which he then had reprinted in wallet-size to use as a form of identification card. Thus equipped he was able to get free flights around the country with other airlines who also paid for his food and hotel bills and charged it all to Pan Am. Being a pilot lent him credibility, enabling him to cash fake pay cheques which he used to entertain women.

Impersonation wasn’t the only scam he pulled. One of his early scams was to change the numbers on generic bank deposit slips to his own account number, using magnetic ink. If someone paid in a cheque the money was diverted to his account. The bank got wise to the scam but not before Abagnale had collected $40,000 (£28,000) and changed his name.

Today, Abagnale regrets both his life of crime and the more sensational aspects of his book, and although he says that he’s honoured that Steven Spielberg, Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom Hanks participated in a movie that was inspired by his life, he is at great pains to point out that it is partly fictional.

Customer Reviews

WoW!! *-,.... NICE BOOK I LOVE IT!!!....,-*

This book is vrilliant, even the paper is of the highest qaulity! the book has around 30 cons, scams and hustles, do you watch Hustle? (BBC1)If you do you will see how every con they have ever done is done. the diffrent variations etc. i would recomend this, but beware you have to be practiced, another thing if you are planning to be a con artist, then don't, this book will tell you why, it's a good read. TiMe To bE NeGaTiVe;
1) Not enough pages.
2) Needs to say more about each con.

Fully explains the con artists methods
Quite interesting but a bit short really. Good explanation of the 3 card trick or 'find the lady' - watch out for them with their cardboard box table on the South Bank where I have spotted them! Almost all known con tricks are fully explained in this book with some biographies of famous con artists. Not quite up to date enough to include the biggest pyramid builder since the pharoahs - Mr Bernie Madoff and his very recent ponzi scheme - but a good explanation of how to go about it.