How Not to Get Scammed || Daniel Simons & Christopher Chabris

our personal and professional lives. Christiop ver Shabri is professor and co director of the Behavioral and Decision Sciences Program at Geisinger Health System. He is also a faculty co director of Geisinger's Behavioral Insights Team. From twenty fourteen to two thous yet and seventeen, he wrote a monthly column called Game on for the Wall Street Journal. His essays

have been published in several media outlets. Daniel and Christopher met at Harvard University in nineteen ninety seven, where they began to collaborate on research. In two thousand and four, they shared the Ignobel Prize in Psychology Award for the Invisible Guerrilla Experiment. Together, they co authored the New York Times bestselling book of the same name. Their latest book is called Nobody's Full While We Get Taken In and

What We Can Do About It. In this episode, I talked to Daniel and Christopher about scams and how not to get scammed. With enough information and persuasion, anyone can fall for a scheme. According to Daniel and Christopher, certain cognitive biases can make us vulnerable to deception. So to help us outsmart con people, they elaborate the different types of scams and how they work, all the while giving us tools to navigate shady situations. I really like Daniel

and Christopher. I've known Christopher for a while. He was really encouraging me when I was working by a dissertation way back in the day, and I always found him such a brilliant, brilliant human Daniel. I came across when I was doing the National geographic show Brain Games, and I saw him on that show, and I thought he did a great job on that show, and I've been a really great admirer of his really sound, calm thinking

about cognitive science and the biases that we have. So it was great to connect with both of them, and I found this a really rich conversation, really relevant to all the scams and cons that are going on in the world today, and I'm sure you'll find it informative as well. So, without further ado, I bring you Daniel Simmons and Christopher Chabri. Chris and Dan is so nice to have you on the Psychology Podcast.

a point in human history. It hasn't been a timely topic, but it just seems, you know, it seems like a great timely topic right now, and as illustrated by the fact you have the falling types of scams that you cover. And yes, I'm gonna run through the list. Ponzi schemes, phishing emails, fake political candidates, business email compromise, romance scams.

I want to get to that one later. Forgeries and fakes, hoaxes, bullshitting, doping, plagiarism, same name scam, affinity fraud, structuring, cherry picking, call center scams, president scam, kidnapping, injury scam. I'm curious why you put those two together. Identity theft, scientific paper mills, illusory truth in the big lie, and gaming the metrics. Wow, that's a pretty exhaustive list, and I think that people can probably think of examples of most of these, if not

all of these. So I was wondering, do you guys have a favorite con or scam? Maybe each of you have your own favorite that you came across as you're working through the book, And what can it teach us?

I think, and it works like this. You work for a large organization and a large company or some kind of middle management type person, and you've got a phone call and the person on the other end of the line says that they're the CEO of your company, and they say that, you know, they need you to help them execute some kind of project, and they're going directly to you because there's urgency, or they don't want to involve certain other departments, or they need to keep this confidential.

So this doesn't spread around too much, and it results in you getting talked into sending a large amount of corporate funds to some kind of you know, bank account, wire transfer, or even in some cases you know, taking out cash and bringing it someplace and like handing it through a doorway to someone who you don't even see. Amazingly enough, it works in some cases. It's kind of audacious in the way that you know, the con artist just like calls someone up and pretends to be the

CEO of their company, and it works. And there's a few reasons I think why it can work. It seems outlandish that anyone would fall for it, but it's worked over and over again. I don't know that one just came to mind right now as being like something that I didn't know existed before working on this book, and yet I think we were sort of able to sort of fit it in, like all the other ones, into the framework that we talk about in the book.

group these two together? The injury kidnapping one is actually a really common one now and there are very many variants of it. Right, So, this is one where it's a somewhat targeted scam, but not hugely. They will call up a parent or a grandparent and say, your kid's

been in an injury. We need you to send money right away so we can get them whatever they needed an emergency, or your kid's been kidnapped, and they produce sounds sounding like your kid to send money right away, right, And that's one I think is it's not I wouldn't call it a favorite. It's I think one of the most egregious and horrible ones because it's preying on people's

fear as opposed to praying on their greed. Right. So, you know, when somebody falls for a scam that promises them huge amounts of money really quickly, it's like, yeah, okay, they took something that was too good to be true and believed it. In this case, they're taking something that is terrifying to them. They're under huge time pressure and they're taking advantage of that to take money from people who might be really desperate. So and that one's really

prevalent right now. There are lots of variants of it that are out there, and some of them target just enough. They find out who your kids are based on social media stuff, and then they target one person at a time.

When they're able to do that sort of learning of your voice from much more minimal audio content, then imagine how that scam works when they put your kid on the line and it's actually their voice that's just given

to be that much more powerful. So it's one of those scams where I think it would be really in people's interests to try and anticipate it and prevent it in advance by, for example, having a family passcode so that if you get a call and you're being put under time pressure and somebody's in danger, they should always be able to give you that passcode if that's really them, And if they can't, you know, it's probably a scam.

rhetoric and so on. Certainly political communication is definitely an area we talk about a little bit in the book, and some more sort of subtle aspects of politics too, like not not just sort of like what messages politicians say and and and so on, but even tactics like you know, running fake candidates or real candidates, I should say, but who are only run for the purpose of diluting the vote of other candidates, you know, by having so

smiller names or more recognizable names, or more American sounding names,

let's say, than competing candidates. And some elections these days, you know, are close enough that you know, if you can change a few hundred votes here, a few thousand votes there, you know, the whole you know, the whole legislature might you know, might flip to the other party or something like that, and those kinds of techniques directly, you know, try to exploit some of the tendencies that we talk about in the book, that the framework that

we describe of the habits we follow when we're making decisions and the kinds of information that hook us even but by the way, even the two that you when you asked us our favorites, right, the president scam I mentioned, and Dan talked about kidnapping injury scams, they really both start from, you know, the very same thing, which is

truth bias, which we talk about in the book. And you mentioned evolution, right, So like you know, I think you know, it's safe to say that there's something about the way the mind has evolved where we tend to believe what people tell us, right, And that's that's the beginning of both of those scams, right, Like, if you don't believe your CEO would call you up and they're on the phone, or you don't believe that your kid might you know, get injured and you know, and someone

would call you about it. You know, that's you know, there you go, that starts the process.

to make their commitment more and more extreme. And when you're really committed to a position or a statement or a belief, it's really hard to challenge it, right, So you're willing to take on more and more stuff that might be way outside the mainstream norms just because you're already kind of committed and you assume that this person is telling you the truth.

started with. So, for example, if you believe that Trump always tells the truth, which some people do, you can then convince yourself of all kinds of other things, because if they are inconsistent with Trump telling the truth, then they can't be true, right or maybe less politically, we talk about this phenomenon called the Mendela effect, which you probably know about, where people think that some people sort of convince themselves that they had a strong memory of

Nelson Mandela having died, you know, in prison, you know, decades before he was released and became President of South Africa. And so if in light of the fact that everybody else seems to think that Nelson Mandela did not die in prison and did become president of South Africa, they can convince themselves that the timeline must have been forked. Or some sinister forces are like rewriting, you know, all the record books and libraries and everything like that. And

it's all because they believe my memory must be true. Right. If they didn't have that fixed commitment of their memory being correct, they wouldn't arrive at all these absurd conclusions.

You know, if you have some inherent belief that someone's a good person and that they you know, wouldn't lie or wouldn't cheat or something like that, you will sort of figure out why what they said was not an instance of doing that, you know, or of bullshitting or whatever, you know, whatever you want to call it.

that's less of interest to us. Then why do people believe things that con arts tell them?

and he's about to introduce his next stock pick. Like that is almost word for word in actual advertisement that followed me around on the internet for you know, for years, you know, like that one weird old tip ad that used to follow people around every website. They went to this one. This one followed me, and you know, it's very encouraging, like we should click this guy he picked you know, two of the biggest growing stocks ever, you know, and you know, let's see what he's got to say next.

But what the advertiser is doing is really focusing our attention on just one out of four boxes in what we call the possibility grid. So in this case, imagine like a two x two grid of boxes, and the top row of boxes is stocks this guy picked, and then the left column is ones we wish we had bought, right, So stocks he picked, and we wish we had bought Amazon and Tesla, And that's what they're really focusing on, right We wish we had bought Amazon when this guy

picked it. We wish we had bought Tesla when this guy picked it. We'd be millionaires or more by now. But notice that that top row this guy picked, you know, also might include things we don't wish we had bought, And they're not telling us about any of his other picks, Like what if he picked pets dot com right before it like went bankrupt or something like that in the Internet age, Or what if he picked any one of a number of other Internet stocks that like, you know,

you could have lost all your money on. And then of course there's other stocks we wish we had bought. That's that left column, remember, but the bottom row is like ones he didn't pick. So how come he didn't pick Apple? How come he didn't pick Microsoft? How come he didn't? Right, we don't know about all the stocks he didn't pick that we wish we had, you know, bought. And then of course there's the bottom right corner, which are the ones he didn't pick and and we didn't

wish we had bought. But if you just think about those other three boxes besides the one that the ad is trying to focus us on, those two winning stock picks, those are the other possibilities, right, So we call it the possibility grid because there are other possibilities for what could have happened or what might be happening that our attention is not being drawn to. So you know, you don't need to know how many stocks are in those other boxes. You just need to realize that there's a

lot more than two. And in fact, those two things are like very unrepresentative of you know, what's likely to happen. You know, if you take this guy's next pick, he must have picked other stocks, because like you can't make a living picking one stock every thirteen years or something like that.

of the possibility grid. We don't talk about, you know, all of the things that they did that failed, or we don't talk about all of the other people who did exactly the same thing they did and crashed and burned, right, and all the other things that led to success. So it's essentially focusing you in on anecdotes and testimonials, and when you do that, you don't think about all of the other kinds of information that might actually tell you whether or not something is even associated with success.

incredibly successful company. And of course they're incredibly successful, and they probably have some good ideas for how to run things, but not necessarily every way they do things contribute to their success. It could be that they can afford to do those things because they're so successful. Right, Once you're making that much profit, you can start giving away more stuff to your employees. You can adopt maybe hiring practices that wouldn't actually work for other firms, that that other

firms can't afford, or that wouldn't work. And I'm not trying to single like Google, but like there's there's ones you know about. Many of these, like Facebook used to be you know, talked about in the same way, and you know, and and so on, and there's always like this, this must be a secret to their success. It's probably in most cases reverse causality.

But before the Internet, before social media and so on, the infamous Nigerian email scams were sent out by letter you know, and then by facts you know and so on. So the technology actually sort of seems to be often making it easier, you know, for scammers to to operate, whether it's you know, Facebook or anywhere else.

that's that's going to be. You know, that doesn't change. That just makes it easier and easier to not target, to just reach out and let people self select into a scam.

this vast fortune, and then we'll reward you. Right. So it's what's known as an advanced fee scam. They get you to pay something, and then they get you to pay a little more, and then pay a little more with the promise in advance that you're going to get something back. When you don't actually get something back, but you know that, you might think, okay, well maybe they

should use chat GPT to make their emails more coherent. Right, they could do that, but then what you'd have is people who are at least somewhat skeptical responding to the emails. And if you have people who are somewhat optical responding, then you have to deal with them and interact with them. But those are not the people who are likely to send in money in the end, because they're probably not

gullible enough. They're skeptical about this, they just want to check, and it's much harder to persuade somebody who going in is a little bit skeptical than somebody who thinks, oh, this is a great opportunity. So you need to reach that tiny percentage of people for whom this email still looks good enough to be possible, as opposed to too good

to be true. So by blasting it out to millions of people and making it ridiculous sounding, they filter out the skeptics and leave just the people who are most likely to send in their money in the end, because it takes them a lot of time to interact with those people.

They want people who will just be taken in by seeing an Apple logo and some you know a little fine print at the bottom and not realize something's not quite right about this. Right. They don't want those people who pay that much attention, right, They wanted all those people to just opt out of the scam by pressing delete, you know, and they never want to hear about her or think about those people again.

anybody else. So the more with this, even more she'd be doing a service.

But I think one of the crucial ones in the Madeoff case was the way that he created, in a sense, a new kind of scam that wasn't It's often referred to as a Ponzi scheme, but it was really a modernization of the Ponzi scheme that made it appealing to a more sophisticated and wealthier client tele in some ways. So in the traditional Ponzi scheme, you are offered some ridiculous return on your money, like you'll get fifty percent return on investment in six months. I think that might

have actually been Ponzi's original proposition. It was fifty percent in six months. And of course what happens is money gets paid in by people, and then, you know, after six months, you pay out to the people who paid in six months ago, and you just keep on doing that until, of course eventually you run out of money because you're not taking it enough money to pay out, you know, to pay out the former people. So made off. Was a Ponzi scheme in that respect, but he didn't

offer people fifty percent in six months. He basically just said I will manage your money. I'll invest it in high quality stocks. And you know my reputation, I'm a famous guy on Wall Street. You know there are people I've been managing money for for years and so on, many people, and you'll get about eight to ten percent on your money every year. But it'll be solid, it'll you know, it'll be it'll be you know, consistent returns.

And so the key element here was the consistency. If you look at like a graph of people's accounts with Madoff, it's just a smooth line going straight up, like it never even ticks down for a month, like very even rarely goes down for a month, never went down for a year. Whereas any kind of investment which is correlated with the actual stock market is going to have some good years in some bad years, and typically the good

years are just better than the bad years. So in the long run, you know, in the long run, you do go up, but you go up, you know, chopping up and down like that, as opposed to a smooth increasing line. And it was that consistency of the increase that that was the special thing about Madoff's proposition that made it a different kind of scheme and really, you know, suck people in who would have recognized the obvious scam, you know, but this was this was harder.

like he's lazy, do you know what I'm saying. It's like that's what Bog was my mind.

you know, in the history of the Ponzi scheme. But he couldn't sell it because it was because it was connected to the Ponzi scheme, and the Ponzi scheme would have been on covered if he had actually gone through the entire process of trying to sell the operation. So he sort of trapped himself, right, And I think part

of what happened in his case. We again we don't really try to like get into the minds of the scammers very much, but I think part of what happens in some of these cases is that you're doing it and you have to keep on doing it to maintain you know, to maintain it even if you even if you don't necessarily want.

scammer get out of this. Right, So, if somebody is trying to pass off fake art, high end art Jackson Pollocks or something, it's worth it to them to go to a huge amount of effort to fake the history of the painting, to demonstrate that it's been exhibited in places, to get experts to kind of certify it. Because if they can do those things, the payout is gigantic. So they might spend years setting up one fraud and a huge amount of work, but if it works, their payout

is gigantic. So those are cases where you may be looking at something that has all of the signs of being fine and you have to think to yourself, Okay, if they were trying to fool me, you know, how much money is on the line. How much of my risk is there really and if it's big enough, think

about how much they could actually do. I mean, magicians often will spend huge amounts of effort setting up an effect and practice for ages getting it just right, so that you don't see what their method is right for the effect right. They hide it by practicing extensively and working out details extensively that you don't ever think about, you don't ever see. You just see them performing on stage and it looks just kind of fluid and natural

and effortless. But there is a huge amount of effort that goes into any stage magic performance to make sure it's exactly right, because they have an incentive to try and fool a lot of people.

be something that they aren't. A lot of mentalists probably don't even realize they're using magical methods, right. I mean, I think a lot of people who do the sort of mind reading, mentalism, cold reading stuff, they think they genuinely have psychic abilities, and when somebody comes along and debunks them, it's jarring for them because they didn't realize it. Then they're the people who are, you know, knowingly doing

what they're doing. You know, the obvious frauds out there who are passing themselves off the psychics know full well that they're not. Those are the grief vultures and the grief vampires, the people who are like taking advantage of other people. Those are the ones who you know, really get give sort of the magic end of things a bad name.

the scam, whether you're the target of the scam. Right, when you're the target of the scam, it's going to sound plausible or at least somewhat plausible to you, Whereas if you're not the target of the scam, like for the Nigerian email scam, it doesn't sound plausible at all. You never fall from that.

to a certain outcome. This is often used to explain like military decision making and so on, right, but even just you know, bad business decision making, right like we we started planning this thing, and we started you know, building this thing, and so on. Now we have to finish even if it's going to cost us five times

as much, you know, and we write. So I think that sometimes is involved in this kind of individual decision making, like the idea of ultimately getting these riches or owning a real Jackson Pollock for you know, or whatever sort of you know, can exert influence in that way because you've invested you know, your time and you know energy and resources and and belief in it. Right.

they're in on something new. Different frauds with the target people with different desires, right, and you know you or I might not fall for a tender swindler scam, you know, but we're not We're not the target for that one, right, But there are scams out there that will target, you know, people like you or me.

of of a human being. In a way, are sort of like in there, aside from maybe money, which is most of the other scams, although there's money involved in romance scams too, But on the other hand, it's also the area where you'd think people ought to be the most discerning, right, and often they are, right, Like there's a lot of like a lot of pickiness and you know, and like choosing a maid and so on. So in

a way they're sort of fascinating. It's fascinating that they work, but on the other hand, not so surprising that they have such appeal. And I think they work along a lot of the same principles that we talk about in the book for other kinds of scams, you know, there's often a selection process going on here, Like you know, the Tinder swindler probably message a lot of women, you know, and only a few of them like got back to him, you know, and it were able to form like a relationship.

Amazingly enough, he was able to carry on apparently multiple of these relationships that you know at once. Some of these people have like three families, you know, and so on. They also rely on sort of like people not asking the question of what's missing, Like what am I not being told? What should be here that you know is

not apparent. You know. People will say like, oh, I've got to be away on business for two weeks, like oh, okay, no problem, you know, and then like you have no you know, you don't think about what's going on during these other two weeks, you know, and like what is why is there? They're sort of weird signs and we don't ask, like what is behind those. It's a lot of the same, you know, it's a lot of the same concepts that work for all the other kinds of scam.

constructed for any one of us. It's just that the constructor has to maybe know something about us or figure out, like what our tendencies are, what our expectations are. That's an important aspect of it, sort of like what we you know, Giving us what we predict is going to happen is a great way of sort of gaining our confidence and then being able to you know, to swindle us. But for each person that might be different. Right, So there's no just like one class of guloble people and

everyone else is safe. We're all unfortunately, we're all potential victism.

I mean, I think one of the themes that comes through over and over again in these cons that we run across in the book is that highly successful people get scammed. Highly successful people with a great track record of you know, decision making and expertise and education get fooled.

at the conference. They call them up and say, we're the organizers of this conference. We're booking the hotel rooms for people. We're coordinating that. So provide us your card information and we'll get your travel arrange and we'll get your hotel arrange. They have nothing to do with the conference. They're just stealing your card information. And a lot of

academics have fallen for this, right, because we're busy. We know that sometimes there are conference organizers sometimes they do want your card information, right, So this is this is a scam that's targeted at people who are specifically not necessarily gullible, but who are busy, right, and who do these sorts of things enough that they often have other people organizing things for them.

you know, other processes. Maybe that's part of what they're after in the end.

for humanity. You know, I remember Chris, I remember before Chris's answers, I remember on his office door is a thing that Chris said, is something along the lines like my love humans individually or something like that, or collectively collectively I like humans, but individually I don't care for them too much. Chris, something like that my office door.

be questioning everything. You wouldn't believe anything you saw, you wouldn't be able to even have a conversation and make a lunch plan with anyone, because you'd be always wondering, like, well they actually show up, does that restaurant exist? You know, like it's all on right, So you need to have a truth bias. It's too costly to check everything. That's why we have the truth bias. As Dan alluded to earlier, one of the critical ways to differentiate when you need

to check more is the stakes of the decision. So if it's like a single decision with high stakes, right, that's a good time to check more. Like before you pick a financial advisor who gets all your money, you know, you really need to do some investigating, right, because that's all your money, and it's probably a decision you're going to stick with for years, you know, if not, if

not longer. But you know, before you decide where to eat lunch, you know, not necessarily like exactly that that same you know that that same thing, So looking at the cost and benefits, you know, is definitely the I would say the first principle, the first way to strike the balance. But you know, Dan probably has some other some other suggestions on that topic too, well.

make sure that it's labeled appropriately. And then you don't want to check if a product claims that it's organic, do you want to actually go out to the farm that produced it and make sure that they were only using non or non chemical processes. I mean, at some level you can't do it, so and we wouldn't want to. It's because you know, the madeoff scam, big time scams like that are probably rare, right, I mean, it's not too often that any one of us is going to

fall victim to a scam. It's a risk, but it's not such a huge risk that we should be worried about it every moment of every day. We should be worried about it when it matters and there's some things that you can kind of learn up the top that you just know, at least for the scams that are available right now are always going to be scams. If anybody ever asks you to go out and buy a prepaid cash card and read the number to them, it is a scam that just doesn't happen in any sort of

normal business trending gain. Anytime somebody calls you and demands, under huge amounts of pressure, that you go out and get a prepaid cash card or a get Apple gift card or whatever, and this goes around. I mean, my mother was potentially a victim of that scam today, but fortunately didn't go out and buy an Apple gift card.

But it's a really common scam. Call up and tell people that they are at risk, they have to send cash right away, get them on the line, get them hooked, and then ask them to buy gift cards cash cards. Anytime somebody asks you to buy a cash card or a gift card for them on their behalf, it's almost always going to be a scam, and you should hang up right There's nothing they can do to you.

you didn't know it. But but more broadly, right, more broadly, like there's no sort of there's no like set of things that you could know that will sort of solve this whole problem entirely. I think the other the other

point we've tried to the other. The other thing we tried to achieve in writing the book was not only sort of show this framework of like what the cognitive habits and the informational hooks that are involved in all of these scams, but also show so many different examples right of how all of these same things can apply to many different areas. Like you know, romance scams you don't talk about much in the book, but it's definitely

true financial scams. If you read all of this, you will start to recognize the patterns, right, You'll start to be able, You'll start to notice just like sort of like a you know, a chess grand master, you know, notices like you know, when the position is dangerous on

the board and when it's not, and so on. You'll start to notice more of these elements in everyday life, and it'll be much easier for you to sort of figure out, oh, this looks this looks like something I should avoid, whereas this looks like maybe I, you know, maybe it's okay. You'll develop better pattern recognition, you know, for scams and and so on, and that will I think helping a you know, reduce the need for constant skepticism.

It'll be sort of built in a little bit into your you know, into your automatic you know, sorts of processing.

this was really true? And another general principle is there's almost never urgent time pressure to do anything, where there's almost always time to ask a couple more questions, So you know, most of the most of these scammers won't put you under huge amounts of time pressure say this is urgent, you have to do this now or else With whenever you get that sort of time pressure, especially

if somebody is saying that they're a government organization. Governments moved slowly, companies, there's nothing.

It's a time pressure thing, like is you know, is fear and time pressure.

best practices. Oh no, I'm not sure. We haven't mentioned that one in the book, but like that's that's in a way, my biggest regret is that we didn't mention that in the book, because we do have a section where we talk about sort of like sort of evasive non answers that people will give you when you do try to check more and you know, oh, this is a best practice is one of those, because that's sort of an empty response, you know, like who said it

was the best practice, what's the evidence that it's best? How do you know that it's best? Like it just opens up so many more questions, but it tends to sort of be designed to shut down our questioning, when in fact, it should lead us to wonder really more, what's going on you know behind that claim I did that? One's on my mind right now.

you know, it's been validated is another fun one. I thought, yeah, this process, it's been validated.

You mean one motherfucker from Harvard found. But you know, it's like you're not saying like that Harvard found, you know, like they they add this shit just to sound legitimate, you know.

these non response, you know, responses. So it's important before you ask a question to sort of have some discernment about what might actually count as an answer versus versus what doesn't, because otherwise it can be sort of you know, box checking exercise, like oh, we asked them and they said they did their due diligence or everything must be.

another book, because the world needs you to. So thank you so much for being on my show.