The Rhetoric of a Scam

Online game advertisements on social media often show clips of people failing to complete an easy puzzle. It's a common trick from Three Card Monte scams, and a ploy worth understanding.

Three Card Monte is that game where someone shows you a card and then asks you to follow that card while they move three cards around the table. 

It looks really easy. But more importantly, almost every time a person first encounters the game, they will see someone beating the dealer - often for an outrageous sum of money. That "winner," however, is working with the dealer. They make the game look easy and/or the dealer look inept.

The person who believes the game they saw was legitimate is the mark.

They see how easy the game is and think, "I can do that." 

And it feels good to think "I can do that." So good, in fact, that many people step up to play when the "winner" walks away counting their money.

And that's the scam.

Seeing the dealer fail at a task that looks easy makes you want to attempt the game yourself. 

And that's all the scammer wants. They want you to make the attempt.

• At a Three Card Monte table, they want you to think the dealer doesn't have the sleight of hand skills that they actually have. 
• On social media, the gaming company wants you to click through to their game that's loaded with advertisements. 

In both cases, once a mark joins, they are invested because the hook appealed to their sense of competence and/or superiority. 

So, yeah, if you're about to engage in something that makes you feel smart because you just watched someone fail, there's a good chance that you are the mark.