A Set on edgi
The Con Artist's Toolkit
Every scam ever run pulls the same few levers. Learn them before someone uses them on you.
-
Social proof
Social proof occurs when people copy others to determine correct behavior during uncertain situations, often leading to genuine belief.
-
Authority bias
Authority bias is the tendency to assume an opinion or order is accurate simply because it comes from an authority figure.
-
Reciprocity (social psychology)
Reciprocity is the learned social norm of returning favors and harms.
-
Scarcity (social psychology)
Scarcity causes people to place higher value on limited items, driving panic buying, impulse purchases, and biased decisions.
-
Foot-in-the-door technique
The foot-in-the-door technique gets people to agree to a huge request by securing a tiny yes first.
-
Sunk cost
A sunk cost is money, time, or effort that has already been spent and cannot be recovered by any future choice.
-
Cold reading
Cold reading uses high-probability guesses and subtle body language cues to make strangers reveal their own details while believing the reader knew them.
-
Social engineering (security)
Social engineering tricks people into handing over private data or access by exploiting human psychology rather than software bugs.
-
Overconfidence Bias
Overconfidence bias is a mental blind spot where a person's certainty in their own judgment reliably exceeds its actual accuracy.