The first time I got conned (that I'm aware of) was about thirty years ago. I was in La Guardia airport, heading home after a four day visit in New York with my friend Claire Fowler.
A young man approached me with a story about a lost plane ticket to Montreal. I forget his many machinations now, except for the one where he took pains to explain why the lost ticket form he showed me seemed so worn.
In all my life's experience to that point I'd never been given cause to believe that a person asking for help was being anything but completely sincere. I gave him ten dollars.
As I watched him fairly skip down the long spare hallway, doubt grew.
That young man, of course, made it a lot harder for everyone who followed. I'm not going to say I've never been scammed since. But, the guy outside the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia ten years later with the tremendously detailed improbable story about having his car towed, well, I just walked away.
These guys work hard for their money and they know their marks. They target tourists because tourists are already a little vulnerable, more ready to identify with someone in trouble and they carry cash.
If anyone had asked me, I imagine I would have said that this kind of in-person scamming had disappeared beneath the waves of on-line fraud and more lucrative lines of exploiting human emotions like Russian bride scams.
So it took a minute or two before I knew what was going on last Saturday. I was walking along Gerrard Street, on my way to take some pictures of the new children's playground in the Allan Gardens. I was approached by a man, carrying a set of car keys in one hand, a cell phone and a five dollar bill in the other. He may have been in his mid-to-late 30's. Nothing about him was particularly eye-catching or odd.
I'm used to getting panhandled in this neighbourhood by any and all manner of people, so when he asked me if he could talk with me, I slowed and prepared to say "no, sorry" - I don't carry cash anymore. Then I got the smoothly pitched, improbable story with details popping up just when my face signalled to the man that I might need some help believing him:
"Can you help me. I'm not from around here. I'm from Buffalo. My name's Steven. My wife's water has broken and she's been taken to the hospital ... Scarborough General hospital ... there were complications ... a cab driver I talked to said he'd take me there for twenty dollars ... I spoke with a police man on Carlton Street ... I'm legally blind and I can't drive there myself..."
He lost me long before he finished, but I admired the many ways the story was engineered to both evoke trust and trigger an emotional response. The props he carried backed up his story and suggested I'd get five back from my twenty. He told me his name. His wife is having a baby! He's far from home! He knows the local street names! He's blind! He hopes I've never heard of Women's College Hospital three blocks away!
True story or false, I still couldn't help him with the one thing he wanted and pointedly did not ask for: cash.
As soon as I made that clear to him, he was off like a shot.
Thanks for reading!
Have a great week!
Karen
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