The Mind Of A Con Man

I don't care how savvy you think you are, a con man, who thinks differently than you or I, can out maneuver you, in other words, con you. I learned this lesson very early in our marriage. Ron had a growing accounting business in Century City and was looking to expand. My mother in law was in Las Vegas and met a young man that was just moving to Los Angeles and was looking for a job as a CPA. When Anita (my mother in law) got home and told Ron about the young accountant, Ron called him right away. They met, Ron checked out his credentials, and he started work. He was a wonderful worker, but about a month into the job, he told Ron he had to go to Chicago to visit his sick relative. He never returned, never called, just disappeared. How could this happen? He had said he was working at a firm in Chicago, and Ron checked him out. If you're a con man you think of everything, and apparently he had someone covering for him at the accounting firm, or perhaps the whole firm was ficticious. This was long before the internet, so things could not be checked out the way they can now. It was a cheap lesson, as it really didn't cost Ron anything, but I can't help and think about what could have been. Remember the movie The Imposter with Tony Curtis or the more recent movie with Leonardo DeCaprio about an imposter? Amazing how these men can con even the smartest people around. How about Bernie Madoff? Here's another story about an academic fraud by Diederik Stapel. It's hard to believe these things go on, but they do, and at the highest level. Stapel was a well respected researcher, working at several universities-Amsterdam, Groningen and Tilburg through the years. During the years when he was publishing research papers based on fraudulent research, he was overseeing many Ph.D students, and investigators combed through mounds of evidence to see if any of his students were involved in the fraud. Stapel made up research information upon which scientific articles were written and accepted by the scientific community. Stapel admits that his deceit was driven by ambition. He said he loved social psychology (his field), but was frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. So he made up the experiments and the data to give the results he expected would be achieved. Every year, the Office of Research Integrity uncovers numerous instances of bad behavior by scientists, ranging from lying on grant applications to using fake images in publications. The once celebrated South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk stunned scientists in his field a few years ago after it was discovered that almost all of the work for which he was known was fraudulent. The prominent Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser resigned in 2011 during an investigation by the Office of Research Integrity at the Department of Health and Human Services that would end up determining that some of his papers contained fabricated data. Who can forget the British scientist Andrew Wakefield who said his research showed that vaccinations could cause autism? His paper has since been retracted, but he did enormous damage to research on the study of autism. Frauds exist in every walk of life. The reasons for a persons deceit are generally the same: they want fame, fortune and recognition. It's unfortunate that we need to be so skeptical of everything today. I feel like such a cynic, but when you hear about these people, and we hear about them everyday, how else can you be? If you've been burned by a con man, as we have, you have to question everything.