The best way to conclude a long con

When you look at long cons — elaborate multi-stage scams that last weeks or months or years to slowly build deep trust with a victim to secure a final payout — you realise that the real professionals like to conclude proceedings in a particular way.

This is a craft that has been developed over generations by people who spend their lives devoted to working out the most effective way to elicit specific behaviour from people, and so every single part of the process has been tweaked and honed to near perfection.

So what is the preferred manner for the experts to conclude a long con? Let's look at a classic example.

The classic

The wealthy target (the 'mark') is lured progressively into some sort of too-good-to-be-true opportunity whereby he believes he can bet on a 'sure thing'. He is given some quick, easy wins early on, and then presented with another opportunity to bet on something that 'can't lose', but this time he needs to bet big. It's an illegal, underground boxing match which has conveniently already been 'fixed'. One of the fighters will take a dive, and the man gets to bet on the other guy.

Of course, this underground boxing match is all an elaborate theatrical affair which has been staged purely for the 'benefit' of the mark. He arrives, hands over his bag of cash and watches the proceedings in eager anticipation.

Just when his guy is about to win, something 'goes wrong'. His guy walks into a punch and gets knocked out. The back-alley doctor jumps into the ring and pronounces him dead - oops.

Right on cue, police start pouring in through the front door and the mark is ushered out a secret back exit so he can 'escape'. He's definitely not happy to be walking away from his 500k in cash, but — all things considered — it's the obvious decision. He cuts his losses and runs to avoid the bigger threat of prison time for involvement in (what he believes to be) an illegal fight resulting in death.

The beauty of it

Of course, the conmen could have just had the boxing match end in an 'upset' and tell the mark: "hard luck, it didn't work out, get out of here", along with a hard word about trying to come looking for his money.

That problem is, they'd be making an enemy for life out of a man who might literally chase them forever. The scammers don't want to spend their time and energy looking over their shoulders, so they engineer a situation whereby the the victim is induced into walking away himself... voluntarily... by choice.

It's about as perfect as you can get: in the mark's mind: he took the risk, there was bad luck at play, things didn't work out, and there's nothing more to be done.

This way, the conmen can get on with preparing their next scam, in peace.

Now scale that up

Imagine if you weren't running a scam on one man, but instead an entire population. In that case, 'ending things' in a clean fashion is not just a nice-to-have, it's a necessity.

When you've just hoodwinked millions of people through a multi-year long-con — if you don't wrap it up with some finesse — you might just have an army of people filling the streets holding pitch forks.

You can't just use the old "better run back home, the authorities are after you", because — let's face it, if you just scammed the entire population — you are the authorities.

To have the entire population go back to work like nothing happened, you can't just threaten them. If they really understood that what you did was deliberate and orchestrated, they would likely be very, very unhappy about it.

So what do you do?

You make them an offer.

Not overtly, but you communicate to the populace (via the regular media channels) some ideas that they can accept, should they choose to.

You tell them that it was all a big mistake: it was all so 'complicated', there were so many different people and systems involved, and mistakes were made (passive tense) under pressure.

You tell them that nobody is to blame: everyone was just doing their best, nobody could have possibly predicted the negative outcomes or handled it any better given the complex and 'novel' situation.

And you tell them that we did it together: it wasn't the authorities using mouth-pieces to coerce and threaten you across the spectrum of your daily life, no it was US, together, navigating these unchartered waters, collectively deciding to take all these actions, as a group, right?

But hang on a second...

Why would the general public take this offer? Why would they accept these premises? They know that there was top-down enforcement, they know that this whole operation ran on deliberate coercion, so why would they accept this version of events and agree to lie to themselves, letting the authorities off the hook?

Well, there's one simple reason.

Now, I'm not talking about the people who are miraculously still hypnotised in 2026, masked up and keeping up with their boosters, they are a breed of their own. I'm talking about for most people. They know something was up, they know deep down it wasn't all a big accident, but they choose to let the issue drop and disappear in the rear-view mirror. Why? I believe it's embarrassment.

Embarrassment because they know they complied of their own free will, and they know why, and it definitely wasn't to 'save grandma'.

They know they didn't really believe in the science. The science was presented in such a ridiculously inconsistent and illogical fashion that nobody in their right mind — with any intellectual honesty — could. It was designed and presented that way, on purpose, to make anyone that still went along with it, in effect, complicit.

Technically speaking, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, it's nescience — the lack of knowledge. Ignorance, traditionally speaking, means something else. The latin root ignorare meant "to take no notice of" — ie to ignore. And as we've all heard, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Likewise, people know that they walked into the tent or doctor's office and held their arm out. Nobody did it for them. Nobody put a (literal) gun to their head. There was social engineering pressure coming from multiple vectors, and the victims chose to release that pressure in the exact, predictable way that the scammers created for them: by complying with the directive.

A tale as old as time

The people who perpetrate large scale operations like this didn't wake up yesterday. Just like the 'art form' of the long con, the deliberate manipulation of the group mind via social and cultural engineering is a craft which has been studied, tested and honed over thousands of years. The fact that watching the news, or a movie, or a social media reel doesn't feel like being struck with a weapon, is testament to its effectiveness.

So how do we not get scammed again?

The golden rule of con artists

If you've read or watched enough material on the industry of con artistry, you will be aware of a recurring 'truism': "You can't cheat an honest man".

For small scale scams, the idea is that the bait is usually 'too good to be true' — the promise is obviously unethical, or suspiciously 'too easy' and as such, an honest man would not fall for it.

When the long-con is writ large, I believe the same principle holds, but in a different way.

If someone don't love truth above all else, then they — by definition – fall into the trap of valuing what is expedient. What is convenient. What is the 'smart' way to 'get ahead' in this material world.

When someone spends their life trying to be smart rather than moral, and later realises (even if only deep down) that they were scammed, their ego wants nothing more than to forget about it. To bury those feelings of guilt, shame, and embarrassment, never talk about any of them ever again.

When the vast majority of society is conditioned to think along those same lines, it becomes possible to collectively 'forget' mutual transgressions and flaws of character. If they try really hard to distract themselves, they can almost convince themselves, that they don't exist.

Not their first rodeo

You may have heard that men who returned from tours of 'duty' in World War 2 "didn't want to talk about it". We're told this was due to the unspeakable horrors they had seen, that would be too painful to recall — and sure that was probably part of it.

Perhaps these men, though, during their time away from home, started to suspect what many of us realise now, with the benefit of hindsight — that these were not organic conflicts 'between nations' but rather, sacrificial culls of young men orchestrated by international bankers (on behalf of their own masters).

Maybe these men, over time, caught on that they were duped into participating in this mass ritual through engineered media lies, an implanted sense of 'patriotism', a false sense of their obligation to the 'group', and ultimately to avoid being labelled a 'coward' by young women who were paid by the government to hand them white feathers.