Scams, False Identities and other Mind Games:

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ouinon
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07 Sep 2010, 2:57 pm

:?: What are the most bizarre, or dramatic, or complicated scams, cases of false identity, or other mind-games, that you have experienced? :)

The following wasn't a money scam, though we did pay for a few meals, and some drinks. It was someone pretending to be someone else.

A man that I believed to be a 30 year old practising psychiatrist, with flat in Pimlico, London, a degree from Cambridge, and a dead wife and child buried in Scotland after a terrible car accident, turned out to be a 27 year old outpatient of a mental institution, living with his mother in a council flat, and working as a security guard.

The car that he picked a friend and me up in when we were hitchhiking from London to Scotland one Friday evening, ( and which broke down near Durham, so that we had to rent a hire-car to get back ), turned out to have been borrowed from a friend, ... and the sad trip to visit his wife and child's burial place was originally a trip to Manchester, not even half way to Scotland, but when he found out that we were hitching to Scotland he, unbeknown to us, changed his plans.

He spent the whole weekend with us, invited to by us, because not only did my friend feel guilty about the car, because it was while she was taking a turn driving, ( we had driven through the night and he was falling asleep ), that something happened to the gears, and she felt responsible, but because he also seemed fascinating/exciting. My friend's boyfriend ( in Scotland ) suspected him immediately, as did my male flatmate ( in London ) and another male friend, who met him on our over-excited sleep-deprived return late on the Monday.

Our new psychiatrist friend had a particularly chunky sort of watch, and he pretended that it was a pager. That got my flatmate and the other male friend really riled up! :lol

He had fallen in love with my friend, and I with him; it's the only time that that particular friend and I had ever been in conflict over a man ( but I was very understanding! :lol ).

The very next day after our return he called her at work to say that he had lost his job because he had got into a fight with a colleague who accused him of telling lies about his trip, that his tale of meeting two gorgeous women hitchhikers and spending the weekend with them was a ridiculous story. My friend cried about it. I found it hard to believe, but in fact it was probably one of the very few things that he told us which was true. Over the course of the next few weeks she saw him a couple of times for lunch. He called on me and confided in me how much he loved her, asked me if he had a chance.

He began waiting for her after work, showed her what he said were psychiatric medical files about patients with bizarre sexual urges and fantasies. He called us constantly at work. He began lurking outside her flat in the evenings. We began to get scared, and suspicious.

And then one night he came round to my flat, when my flatmate was out, and began drinking huge amounts of vodka, straight, with black pepper, that he asked for, and he began talking "psychiatry" but made the mistake of using/repeating back to me a term that I, a psych grad, had made up for a certain school of psych thought/analysis, ( "onion theory" ! :lol ), using it seriously, and he knew, the instant that he said it, from my face, that he had made a mistake, and he pretended to black out; he sank in the most unconvincing stagey way to the floor, and stayed there. Half an hour passed, and I caught him looking from under his eyelids. I began to talk of calling for an ambulance, I put a cushion under his head, "just in case", and then, tiring of the charade, I went to my bedroom, and shut the door. Within minutes he was knocking at my door. I told him to leave. He did.

My friend used her job as academic conference organiser to investigate his supposed qualifications; noone with his name had graduated from Cambridge in the five years or so that he should have done. I used my ( then ) job with the Inland Revenue to look up his address and job details, and found out that he lived in a council flat with his mother and had been working as security guard. My male flatmate actually walked past the building where he had found his new job one evening and seeing him in the lobby approached to speak with him. Our strange new "friend" insisted that he really was on night-doctor duty of some sort, and that he was just covering for the night porter temporarily.

We looked up births and deaths at the time and in the place that he had told us the accident happened, and there was nothing that matched ( and he had a very unusual name ). My friend looked up the name of the medicine that she saw him taking on several occasions, and it was some sort of pretty strong tranquiliser and/or anti-depressant ( can't remember now what ).

He called on my friend with a cheap plated clover leaf necklace pretending that it was a valuable irish good luck charm and that he had gone all the way over to Ireland to buy it for her. We arranged a series of relays to make sure that my friend didn't have to leave work alone, or was able to leave by a back way, because he waited for her every day now. He phoned us up with increasingly incredible stories about things that were happening to him. Those phone calls went on for quite a long time.

The strange thing is that I don't remember what put an end to it all.

I think the most awful, and saddest, thing about the whole series of events was his losing his original ( day ) job because of lashing out at/having a fight with a colleague who didn't believe that he could possibly have spent the weekend with a couple of young, attractive women.

My friend is probably somewhere on or near the spectrum too. We didn't see through his act until he made an intellectual slip. It was quite a shock.
.



JayL
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07 Sep 2010, 3:14 pm

Onion theory. :)



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07 Sep 2010, 4:01 pm

I know of a middle aged woman who spun a web of deceit that included fake cancer (for more than 10 years) and fake lovers/boyfriends. No one was allowed to meet her boyfriends or know too much about her treatment as she appeared to have trust issues and was very private. Some friends began to question parts of her stories and some of those who were not scapegoated still seem to believe the stories. These believers think that everyone else is telling lies about our mutual friend. As a result of this experience, I have become skeptical of most stories that I am now told by people even if they may be true. Are these stories the truth or are they distortions of their perception of reality?

I do not want to be sceptical of those who may be telling the truth but I don't know any more how to tell when someone is telling lies to gain attention, etc.



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07 Sep 2010, 4:47 pm

ouinon wrote:
:?: What are the most bizarre, or dramatic, or complicated scams, cases of false identity, or other mind-games, that you have experienced? :)

A place where one particular species is somehow convinced it is master of all. Where every 'normal' individual of that species believes itself to be 'special' and in control of fate. It's a false-identity scam of *mass* proportions. :)


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08 Sep 2010, 3:14 am

I am truly horrified by the ease with which the paedophile sadist Derek Slade managed to obtain a passport using a name of a similar-aged dead person, in order (presumably) to abuse overseas when caught out in the UK (It also emerged that after the school closed in the 1980s Slade obtained a false passport by copying a swindle in Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel Day Of The Jackal. Prosecutors said he was thought to have trawled cemeteries until he found the grave of a boy who had died in childhood but would have been a similar age. He got a copy of that boy's birth certificate and used it to obtain a false passport. After obtaining the passport, Slade travelled to India and Africa, where he set up schools and carried out 'charity work'. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... otive.html).

Various charities were forced to withdraw funding from Derek Slade's projects when he was charged (e.g. Help A Poor Child (India) President: February 2007 - Mr. Derek Slade is no longer associated with HELP A POOR CHILD. Recent events, which we are unable to disclose at this time, made his position untenable and he was asked to resign as President of HAPC (India). HAPC has completely withdrawn its support of the school. Now, the charity is looking to secure the safe future of the children and recover funds it has made to the school, which is still under the care of Derek Slade and Pir Zainul. HAPC had been providing financial support to the AKEMS school since March 2006. http://www.helpapoorchild.com/index.htm ... &newsid=23).



ouinon
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08 Sep 2010, 3:26 am

ManErg wrote:
ouinon wrote:
:?: What are the most bizarre, or dramatic, or complicated scams, cases of false identity, or other mind-games, that you have experienced? :)
[ One ] where one particular species is somehow convinced it is master of all. Where every 'normal' individual of that species believes itself to be 'special' and in control of fate. It's a false-identity scam of *mass* proportions. :)

I think that falls under "mass delusion" rather than a scam or other mindgame which involves intent to delude or deceive or take advantage of someone. :)

Yes, I agree that some groups and/or individuals within the system may be profiting from the delusion, be benefiting hugely from it even, but although they and others may be actively involved in promulgating/promoting and maintaining the delusion/illusion I don't think that you can call it a scam because they generally believe in it themselves too.

Can you call something a "scam" or "con-trick" or a "mindgame" if the person or persons perpetrating it, or at least contributing to constructing it, believe in the "story" that they are disseminating? Is "ignorance" a defence? ... If it is then I think you can't call the story which society tells itself a "mass-scam". It's just a "mass-delusion".

What about if a person doesn't think, doesn't understand, that there is anything wrong or harmful about allowing people to believe in a particular illusion/story? ie. If a person doesn't think that their story does anyone any ( "real" ) harm, that they themselves are a good/well-intentioned person, and that the illusion they have created was necessary at some point to protect themselves from "pain"?

How much must someone understand that what they have done/are doing is "wrong" before it can be called a scam? ... The experience I described above, of someone pretending to be someone else wasn't a money scam but it aimed at achieving emotional/relational gains with a false identity. He clearly knew that he was telling lies. But I wonder if he understood that what he was doing was "wrong"?
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Last edited by ouinon on 08 Sep 2010, 3:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

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08 Sep 2010, 3:30 am

I ditto Manergs reply. A place where so-called "normal", healthy men: buried under a mountain of repressions and delusions, swarm like out of control locusts over a planet losing biodiversity at a rate of a species every day because of their actions. This is not only a reckless and dangerous scam, but also makes this truly the "wrong planet" for individuals like us who do not suffer from what Nietzsche termed "neuroses of health".



ouinon
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08 Sep 2010, 3:34 am

ouinon wrote:
What about if a person doesn't think, doesn't understand, that there is anything wrong or harmful about allowing people to believe in a particular illusion/story? ie. If a person doesn't think that their story does anyone any ( "real" ) harm, that they themselves are a good/well-intentioned person, and that the illusion they have created was necessary at some point to protect themselves from "pain"?

How much must someone understand that what they have done/are doing is "wrong" before it can be called a scam? ... The experience I described above, of someone pretending to be someone else wasn't a money scam but it aimed at achieving emotional/relational gains with a false identity. He clearly knew that he was telling lies. But I wonder if he understood that what he was doing was "wrong"?
.

How much of a "role/act" are we "allowed" to perform before it becomes manipulation at the level of a scam?
.



ouinon
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08 Sep 2010, 3:37 am

ScottyN wrote:
I ditto ManErg's reply. A place where so-called "normal", "healthy" men, buried under a mountain of repressions and delusions, swarm like out of control locusts over a planet losing biodiversity at a rate of a species every day because of their actions. This is not only a reckless and dangerous scam, but also makes this truly the "wrong planet" for individuals like us who do not suffer from what Nietzsche termed "neuroses of health".

I think that so long as people believe in the "story" they are telling ( whether on an individual basis or as a society ) it doesn't count as a scam.
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08 Sep 2010, 5:16 am

Excuse me, I just was not in a very good state of mind when I posted that, and to be that negative is somewhat out of character for me. It's just that when you do not fit in, one has alot of time to observe things, and not all of what I see is necessarily positive.



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08 Sep 2010, 5:23 am

ouinon wrote:
ouinon wrote:
What about if a person doesn't think, doesn't understand, that there is anything wrong or harmful about allowing people to believe in a particular illusion/story? ie. If a person doesn't think that their story does anyone any ( "real" ) harm, that they themselves are a good/well-intentioned person, and that the illusion they have created was necessary at some point to protect themselves from "pain"?

How much must someone understand that what they have done/are doing is "wrong" before it can be called a scam? ... The experience I described above, of someone pretending to be someone else wasn't a money scam but it aimed at achieving emotional/relational gains with a false identity. He clearly knew that he was telling lies. But I wonder if he understood that what he was doing was "wrong"?
.

How much of a "role/act" are we "allowed" to perform before it becomes manipulation at the level of a scam?
.



as much as you want, so long as you don't get caught. :wink:



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08 Sep 2010, 1:39 pm

Scamopaths topic

These people have no conscience, and only stop when they get hopelessly cornered.


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08 Sep 2010, 2:56 pm

The "Official Story" of 9/11. :roll:


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08 Sep 2010, 2:59 pm

ouinon wrote:
:?: What are the most bizarre, or dramatic, or complicated scams, cases of false identity, or other mind-games, that you have experienced? :)

The following wasn't a money scam, though we did pay for a few meals, and some drinks. It was someone pretending to be someone else.

A man that I believed to be a 30 year old practising psychiatrist, with flat in Pimlico, London, a degree from Cambridge, and a dead wife and child buried in Scotland after a terrible car accident, turned out to be a 27 year old outpatient of a mental institution, living with his mother in a council flat, and working as a security guard.

The car that he picked a friend and me up in when we were hitchhiking from London to Scotland one Friday evening, ( and which broke down near Durham, so that we had to rent a hire-car to get back ), turned out to have been borrowed from a friend, ... and the sad trip to visit his wife and child's burial place was originally a trip to Manchester, not even half way to Scotland, but when he found out that we were hitching to Scotland he, unbeknown to us, changed his plans.

He spent the whole weekend with us, invited to by us, because not only did my friend feel guilty about the car, because it was while she was taking a turn driving, ( we had driven through the night and he was falling asleep ), that something happened to the gears, and she felt responsible, but because he also seemed fascinating/exciting. My friend's boyfriend ( in Scotland ) suspected him immediately, as did my male flatmate ( in London ) and another male friend, who met him on our over-excited sleep-deprived return late on the Monday.

Our new psychiatrist friend had a particularly chunky sort of watch, and he pretended that it was a pager. That got my flatmate and the other male friend really riled up! :lol

He had fallen in love with my friend, and I with him; it's the only time that that particular friend and I had ever been in conflict over a man ( but I was very understanding! :lol ).

The very next day after our return he called her at work to say that he had lost his job because he had got into a fight with a colleague who accused him of telling lies about his trip, that his tale of meeting two gorgeous women hitchhikers and spending the weekend with them was a ridiculous story. My friend cried about it. I found it hard to believe, but in fact it was probably one of the very few things that he told us which was true. Over the course of the next few weeks she saw him a couple of times for lunch. He called on me and confided in me how much he loved her, asked me if he had a chance.

He began waiting for her after work, showed her what he said were psychiatric medical files about patients with bizarre sexual urges and fantasies. He called us constantly at work. He began lurking outside her flat in the evenings. We began to get scared, and suspicious.

And then one night he came round to my flat, when my flatmate was out, and began drinking huge amounts of vodka, straight, with black pepper, that he asked for, and he began talking "psychiatry" but made the mistake of using/repeating back to me a term that I, a psych grad, had made up for a certain school of psych thought/analysis, ( "onion theory" ! :lol ), using it seriously, and he knew, the instant that he said it, from my face, that he had made a mistake, and he pretended to black out; he sank in the most unconvincing stagey way to the floor, and stayed there. Half an hour passed, and I caught him looking from under his eyelids. I began to talk of calling for an ambulance, I put a cushion under his head, "just in case", and then, tiring of the charade, I went to my bedroom, and shut the door. Within minutes he was knocking at my door. I told him to leave. He did.

My friend used her job as academic conference organiser to investigate his supposed qualifications; noone with his name had graduated from Cambridge in the five years or so that he should have done. I used my ( then ) job with the Inland Revenue to look up his address and job details, and found out that he lived in a council flat with his mother and had been working as security guard. My male flatmate actually walked past the building where he had found his new job one evening and seeing him in the lobby approached to speak with him. Our strange new "friend" insisted that he really was on night-doctor duty of some sort, and that he was just covering for the night porter temporarily.

We looked up births and deaths at the time and in the place that he had told us the accident happened, and there was nothing that matched ( and he had a very unusual name ). My friend looked up the name of the medicine that she saw him taking on several occasions, and it was some sort of pretty strong tranquiliser and/or anti-depressant ( can't remember now what ).

He called on my friend with a cheap plated clover leaf necklace pretending that it was a valuable irish good luck charm and that he had gone all the way over to Ireland to buy it for her. We arranged a series of relays to make sure that my friend didn't have to leave work alone, or was able to leave by a back way, because he waited for her every day now. He phoned us up with increasingly incredible stories about things that were happening to him. Those phone calls went on for quite a long time.

The strange thing is that I don't remember what put an end to it all.

I think the most awful, and saddest, thing about the whole series of events was his losing his original ( day ) job because of lashing out at/having a fight with a colleague who didn't believe that he could possibly have spent the weekend with a couple of young, attractive women.

My friend is probably somewhere on or near the spectrum too. We didn't see through his act until he made an intellectual slip. It was quite a shock.
.


I wonder if you would have gotten along so well if he had been honest about his destination and job, whether or not a friendship would have developed etc. The things which people would like to believe, which make them vulnerable to such deception, are often just as interesting as the wild schemes which are dreamed up to take advantage of the preferential desire to believe in such things.

I've only ever fallen for the "my friend is selling that thing you're after, give me the money and I'll go over to his place and buy it for you". It's a simple one but the way I fell for it was strange. I didn't entirely believe that the person would come back but I had no idea how to refuse without violating some perceived social boundary or something. Maybe AS had something to do with the awkwardness I felt in just saying "no, I don't believe you". It was only a small amount of money, so stupidly enough I just came to the decision that it would be easier to just take the risk of letting him go "buy" the thing from his friend, instead of burning out the circuits in my brain by trying to figure out how I was supposed to handle this kind of social interaction.

Needless to say, I have never fallen for it again. Well, I never really "fell for it" the first time, I just thought the risk was a better option than the tangled social mess, but ever since then I have simply said "no, it's alright, I don't really need it" whether it shows a blatant lack of trust or not. It seems like the obvious choice now, but hindsight is 20/20. This kind of response to friendly offers probably does some harm in relationships to honest people, if they do indeed exist, but oh well.



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08 Sep 2010, 3:53 pm

When I worked at this gameshop in the late 80's this guy showed up to play in some of our D&D games that I ran at the shop he said he got washed out of navy seal training due to an injury that got him a medical discharged from the navy. I had just got out army basic training which I ended up getting an entry level seperation from so we had a lot in common. The guy was very charismatic everybody liked the guy. Just about all the gamemasters ran their games around his schedule they almost fought over the guy. He would talk about the weapons and martial arts training he took part in. He even showed us how he could do a full lap underwater with his hands ties behind his back in a mutual friends swimming pool he really looked the part of someone who had some seal training.

One day we were all coming out of a pizzashop when someone yelled "Baby F**ker!" This guy walks up and sucker punches the seal guy. He goes down like a sack of potatoes so the four of us beat and kick the guy who sucker punched the seal guy until he was on the ground in the fetal posistion so then we all left before someone called the cops. When we got back to the shop we asked him what that was about. He told us that he was screwing the guys wife so we had a good laugh people were saying to him "you f**ked his wife and we f**ked him up what a day hes having." we all had a good laughed!

A couple days later the owner of the gameshop asked me to go get some pizzas and walk them back to the shop. When I left shop a woman who was coming in as I was leaving asked me if it made me feel good to kick that guy's ass with my friends. So I responded felt just as good as his sucker punch he gave my friend I am sure. She3 asked how long did I know the seal guy for. I told her a few months. She rolled her eyes at my answer she asked if I would like to learn more about the seal guy so I said yes. when we were waiting for her sub to be made she told me that the guy who we beat up was the father of girl who the seal guy molested and that the seal guy never went to seal training he was kicked out of the navy for molesting kids on one of overseas stays. He also was on did two years for inapropiate touching of minor that was pled down from a much larger felony.

She gave me a ride back to the gameshop were she told everybody at the shop what she told me. She told us he was probably hanging out at the gameshop to get a chance to molest kids. The owner of the shop called the guy up and told him we all knew he was a child molester so he was not allowed or wanted at the shop anymore. Everyone felt bad about beating the guy up so we took up a collection and gave him around $120.00 and written apology signed by everyone explaining everything. :oops:


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08 Sep 2010, 6:08 pm

Invader wrote:
[I wonder if you would have gotten along so well if he had been honest about his destination and job, whether or not a friendship would have developed etc. The things which people would like to believe, which make them vulnerable to such deception, are often just as interesting as the wild schemes which are dreamed up to take advantage of the preferential desire to believe in such things.

I've only ever fallen for the "my friend is selling that thing you're after, give me the money and I'll go over to his place and buy it for you". It's a simple one but the way I fell for it was strange. I didn't entirely believe that the person would come back but I had no idea how to refuse without violating some perceived social boundary or something. Maybe AS had something to do with the awkwardness I felt in just saying "no, I don't believe you". It was only a small amount of money, so stupidly enough I just came to the decision that it would be easier to just take the risk of letting him go "buy" the thing from his friend, instead of burning out the circuits in my brain by trying to figure out how I was supposed to handle this kind of social interaction.
Needless to say, I have never fallen for it again. Well, I never really "fell for it" the first time, I just thought the risk was a better option than the tangled social mess, but ever since then I have simply said "no, it's alright, I don't really need it" whether it shows a blatant lack of trust or not. It seems like the obvious choice now, but hindsight is 20/20. This kind of response to friendly offers probably does some harm in relationships to honest people, if they do indeed exist, but oh well.


Bold analysis topic

You put into words what had happened to me many, many years ago, more than once. I had no idea how to explain why I went along with it. Thank you. :)

At my age (finally) I do not fall for such thinly disguised mini-scams. I am sorry it happened to you, but at least you know now.


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