What Are Confidence Games?
Also known as con games, hustles, swindles and schemes, confidence games are deliberate attempts to defraud an individual or business. This is usually accomplished by enticing the target, who is sometimes referred to as a mark, into investing financial resources in a project that is never intended to earn any type of return. The exact process of a confidence game may involve selling goods or services that are worthless, or creating some type of scheme to make money that seems to promise substantial returns, but only makes money for the individual running the con. While confidence games have probably been around since the beginning of time, the actual identification of his type of trickery as a confidence game is usually traced back to the middle of the 19th century. In the United States, a man by the name of William Thompson ran a scheme in which he would initiate conversations with people he met on the street, secure their confidence, ask to see their watches, then run off with the ti
