When this 28-year-old Austrian left his house with a briefcase of Pokémon cards valued at 105,000 euros, he probably didn’t imagine he would return with another briefcase full of Monopoly bills. If the scam is almost like a movie, the way we fall for such crude tricks is even more surprising.
The young man explained that the fake buyer had contacted him through social networks and showed great interest in acquiring the collection of Pokémon cards. His two requirements were to reduce the original price of 110,000 euros by 5,000 euros, and to attend Turin to formalize the sale. Happy to have found a buyer, the Austrian packed his cards in a briefcase and took a flight from Vienna to Italy.
Upon arriving in Turin and meeting the buyer, he was invited to follow him to an apartment on the outskirts of the city. They had a coffee, exchanged jokes, and then completed the transaction. The seller opened his briefcase with the Pokémon cards, and the buyer did the same with the one containing 105,000 euros. Everything seemed fine.
However, upon returning to the hotel and opening the briefcase again, he discovered that he had actually been walking around the city with Monopoly bills. At some point during the transaction, an accomplice of the scammer had swapped the original briefcase for another one with fake money. After reporting the case to the police, he is still waiting for his cards to be recovered.
Why we are so easily deceived
It is actually surreal enough that, as we said, it seems like a movie. Traveling to another country, going to a stranger’s apartment, not checking everything before leaving… But what we cannot blame the young man for is falling into one of the most crude scams in history. Like magicians, thieves and scammers know very well how to deceive the brain to make us fall into the trap.
Although we often attribute certain superpowers to our minds, the truth is that our brain can be as limited as it is influenciable. For example, we have the absurd habit of focusing our attention on one stimuli at a time, something that pickpockets take advantage of to touch us obviously, causing the mind to focus on that stimuli to steal something from elsewhere.
This stimulus overload can also extend to conversations, where we are bombarded with redundant or complex information so that we cannot focus on the most trivial details. This, combined with the ability to manipulate expectations, for example by inviting us to stare intently when a magician is shuffling cards when in reality he has already prepared the card before that, makes deceiving us much easier than we might think.
Image | Erik Mclean
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