09-28-2007, 12:43 PM
Cabinet of Wonders
Robbing someone using hypnosis is more common than you'd like to think and another case has cropped up. The interesting things about this new case are that it happened in the US of A and that it was captured on security cameras.
Police said that two Indian Punjabi men stole more than $1,000 from the Marlborough Country Convenience Store on Monday. The men told the storeowner that they were guruji, a type of Hindu priest, and that they could read his mind, police said.
Storeowner Yogesh Patel, 29, who is also from India, said that he had heard of the scam but never believed it and never thought it could happen to him. He said he's now upset and embarrassed.
"I'd never been (scammed), and every time I heard about it I laughed at it," Patel said.
The question is how does an apparently sensible chap fall for this? Obviously they were playing on a degree of cultural preconditioning but there is more at work.
The trick
So how was this done?
The report attempts an explanation:
Scam artists commonly use techniques such as cold reading to appear to know more than they really do. In cold reading, a scammer carefully analyzes a victim's mannerisms and other details to determine basic facts about the person. The scammer then may make high-probability guesses and pick up on any signals that indicate they were correct.
Common magic tricks can also allow people to appear to have written something ahead of time that they actually learned later.
But we can go a bit further.
For starters, while the storeowner could be in on the scam, this is all perfectly possible. OK Derren Brown is an expert (and clearly has evil powers) but it is scary to watch:
Now have a look at an explanation of what is going on (presumably using NLP):
It looks like they "broke" the poor guy with a crude magic trick:
Patel said the scam began with a simple mind game. The men asked him what his favorite flower was, and they opened a paper with the correct answer on it: "Rose." They then told him to think of a wild animal, and they again had written down his choice.
The scam quickly escalated to personal information involving family members and a former girlfriend.
"They also said my wife's name that not too many people know," Patel said. "My mom's name, they told me. And they told me what was my future goal."
This seems to go a bit further than simple cold reading. We can't rule out the really dirty psychics tricks (like just researching his family) but the mention of writing the answers down suggests it is simpler than that. The trick usually goes like this: You pretend to write your prediction on a piece of paper and then get the mark to tell you the answer. You then use a bit of pencil lead under your fingernail to write the answer down.
Whatever the exact means it seems to have left the storeowner in a receptive state and he jsut handed the cash over.
Although the police say a crime has taken place I am unsure: They just asked for a donation and he handed it over. If this ever comes to trial it should be a fascinating case and could easily outdo anything in your average courtroom drama.
Story and videos at this link
http://www.wunderkabinett.co.uk/damndata...ieves.html
Robbing someone using hypnosis is more common than you'd like to think and another case has cropped up. The interesting things about this new case are that it happened in the US of A and that it was captured on security cameras.
Police said that two Indian Punjabi men stole more than $1,000 from the Marlborough Country Convenience Store on Monday. The men told the storeowner that they were guruji, a type of Hindu priest, and that they could read his mind, police said.
Storeowner Yogesh Patel, 29, who is also from India, said that he had heard of the scam but never believed it and never thought it could happen to him. He said he's now upset and embarrassed.
"I'd never been (scammed), and every time I heard about it I laughed at it," Patel said.
The question is how does an apparently sensible chap fall for this? Obviously they were playing on a degree of cultural preconditioning but there is more at work.
The trick
So how was this done?
The report attempts an explanation:
Scam artists commonly use techniques such as cold reading to appear to know more than they really do. In cold reading, a scammer carefully analyzes a victim's mannerisms and other details to determine basic facts about the person. The scammer then may make high-probability guesses and pick up on any signals that indicate they were correct.
Common magic tricks can also allow people to appear to have written something ahead of time that they actually learned later.
But we can go a bit further.
For starters, while the storeowner could be in on the scam, this is all perfectly possible. OK Derren Brown is an expert (and clearly has evil powers) but it is scary to watch:
Now have a look at an explanation of what is going on (presumably using NLP):
It looks like they "broke" the poor guy with a crude magic trick:
Patel said the scam began with a simple mind game. The men asked him what his favorite flower was, and they opened a paper with the correct answer on it: "Rose." They then told him to think of a wild animal, and they again had written down his choice.
The scam quickly escalated to personal information involving family members and a former girlfriend.
"They also said my wife's name that not too many people know," Patel said. "My mom's name, they told me. And they told me what was my future goal."
This seems to go a bit further than simple cold reading. We can't rule out the really dirty psychics tricks (like just researching his family) but the mention of writing the answers down suggests it is simpler than that. The trick usually goes like this: You pretend to write your prediction on a piece of paper and then get the mark to tell you the answer. You then use a bit of pencil lead under your fingernail to write the answer down.
Whatever the exact means it seems to have left the storeowner in a receptive state and he jsut handed the cash over.
Although the police say a crime has taken place I am unsure: They just asked for a donation and he handed it over. If this ever comes to trial it should be a fascinating case and could easily outdo anything in your average courtroom drama.
Story and videos at this link
http://www.wunderkabinett.co.uk/damndata...ieves.html