I’m currently writing a novel (or maybe a novella) - it’s one of these five-minutes-into-the-future jobbies, set circa 2060. I’d be eternally grateful if you at the Dope could help me out with a few ideas and technical details.
What I need are some clever con tricks / pranks / ways to cheat the system, either ones that work in the here-and-now or ones that might work in a fictional future. If they’re mechanical or technical in nature, I don’t need to know all the details - but I do need enough to write them plausibly.
One of the characters is dedicated to living “off the grid”. He’s very intelligent, but also a dilletante and somewhat lazy. So any trick that requires, say ten years technical study is a no-go. Anything that could be picked up in a few weeks or months is perfect, as are pranks/con-tricks that would tickle someone with an ironic sense of humour, and anything that would be practical for someone whose aim is not to need a real job.
The world he’s in is a little more big-brother than here (hey, I said it was a 5 minutes into the future story…), where people who do have career paths are monitored much more closely than now. It’s laxer for those in dead-end jobs, the unemployed, students, etc, but not as lax as the real world.
Right now, I know the general themes and plot points, but I haven’t yet pinned the details down. I know I’ll want this character to pull a few hat tricks in the course of the book, and I think having an idea in advance of various things he could do will be easier than scrounging for a trick that fits once I’ve locked myself into a detailed storyline .
Any resources / anecdotes / flights of fancy more than welcome!
The very lazy man’s trick is to cut off the 0’s from one 10 dollar bill and paste them on another 10 dollar bill to make it a 100 dollar bill. This rarely works now, but maybe in the future people see actual cash so rarely they’ll never know that it’s Franklin and not Hamilton on the $100 bill.
I assume this guy has no accomplices and is not interested in long cons?
I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but…
I knew someone who lived in an apartment with central heating. They couldn’t set the temperature for their unit, although there was a sensor in the unit that monitored that it was the correct level. No doubt a cost containment decision.
What they did was pack ice around the sensor if it felt too cold. Then the central furnace believed it was too cold in their unit and would up its output.
Hm…actual cash is actually near non-existent in the story (it’s all linked to a National ID card, along with something that measures and limits allocation of substances that are disapproved of, e.g. alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana), so this could work - but I’m really looking for something a bit cleverer than this. This character has ample opportunity to show his flaws, and I’d quite like to show some ingenuity on his part as well. This is something I’ll keep in mind though, as he doesn’t exist in a vacuum ;). Then again, if people see actual cash so little, wouldn’t they be extra suspicious of it?
He could do a long con that didn’t require long, concentrated effort (he set it up months ago, say, and hadn’t thought about it since, until the day it came to fruition)…and I suppose he could pull in an accomplice if he needed one, for a one-off - but you’re right, he’d be more likely to work solo.
As-is this doesn’t work for me, but the central idea…there’s something there that I could definitely use! (Even if I don’t know quite what it is yet). I’ll tweak it a bit, and add it to my idea bank :).
Futuristic gas siphoning- He powers his house off an electric car battery. He switches out the dead battery every couple of nights with a random parked car in his neighborhood. The plugged in car charges the dead battery before the owners notice (except for a blip on their power bill) and he get a few more days of power.
This (and TriPolar’s idea) are both really good for me, as for a time this character and his girlfriend are living in a London squat (not that his girlfriend is pleased with this state of affairs). There’s no other way this could work, as the house would be linked to the person via ID card if they were renting - but yeah, that’s not the case for these two. Thanks!
Please keep these coming. Ideas that are more prank than con are welcome too.
Check kiting is a classic fraud. People have used it to steal millions. Doesn’t need any special skills, and can be done with a starting capital of a few hundred pounds or dollars or whatever currency.
The basic principle is that you set up several bank accounts. You transfer money from one account to another by cheque. There will be a brief time when the money appears in account 2 before it leaves account 1. You have increased your balance, on paper. Keep transferring, and the amount goes ever upwards. Then when you have a million, transfer it all to a Swiss bank account, and flee to somewhere with no extradition treaty.
Although it might be impossible in 2060’s technology.
I just read a book called “The Big Con” a few months ago. As the title indicates, it doesn’t have a lot in the way of short cons (which require only one or two players). But there are several jobs within the Big Con that your guy could do.
A roper is someone who mostly just travels around meeting people who seem just crooked enough to go into something illegitimate. If he finds one, he takes the person back to where the big game is played and hands the mark over to the “inside man”. This does require some commitment on the part of the roper, since once he’s in at the location where the game is being played, it’s his job to jump in to every proposition that the inside man hands out first, so that the mark feels obligated to go in on it as well.
There’s a smaller job, though, called a shill. Usually this is a short-con operator who comes in for a day’s work as sort of an extra on the set. He’ll pretend to be buying or selling stocks/bets/whatever in large and fast quantities, working the counter, or whatever else to give the proper illusion. Outside of playing the part for an hour or two, he’s free to go.
For short cons, I found this list while trying to recall the ones that were in the book: