Con Artist

The year is 2006. Simon Lovell, a reformed con artist, is sitting in a Barnes & Noble, signing copies of "How to Cheat at Everything" - a 456-page guide detailing every scam he knows. For $19.95, you too can learn the secrets that cost him twenty years of his life to master and who knows how many close calls to escape from.

Inside, between detailed breakdowns of Three-Card Monte mechanics and explorations of casino psychology, Lovell methodically reveals the structured patterns behind street hustles. Each scam, he explains, is a performance designed to exploit specific human behaviors.

In his off-Broadway show "Strange and Unusual Hobbies," Lovell demonstrates these same techniques to packed houses. He literally tells the audience he's going to deceive them, shows them exactly how he's going to do it, and then proceeds to fool them anyway. The ticket sales from people paying to be conned are all sold out.

The book becomes a cult hit among an odd mix of readers: magicians studying the psychology of deception, casino security updating their protocols, and law enforcement officers finally understanding how that one guy kept winning at poker.

In interviews, Lovell keeps dropping the same truth bomb that nobody wants to hear: knowing how a scam works doesn't make you immune to it. The more you understand about deception, the more likely you are to fall for it - because now you're looking for the trick you know instead of the one you don't.

Maybe right this very moment, there's a casino somewhere in Vegas, where a security expert who's memorized every word of Lovell's book is frantically looking for card counters. Meanwhile the dealer at one of the tables has been reading cards off the upgraded ultra-high-definition cameras the security team installed a few weeks ago.

And maybe, just maybe, you've spent the last few minutes so focused on Lovell's lessons about deception that you didn't notice this entire essay was structured using the exact same psychological pattern he describes - the art of making people focus on the expert explaining the trick, while the real deception happens elsewhere.

But of course, I couldn't possibly tell you what you missed. After all, as Lovell says, knowing how a scam works doesn't make you immune to it.