Confidence Trick
Fraud that obtains trust first, so the victim hands over the money themselves.
A confidence trick is a fraud in which the victim hands over money voluntarily, because trust was established before anything was asked for. The name is literal: a swindler arrested in New York in 1849 approached strangers, asked whether they had confidence enough to lend him a watch until tomorrow, and the press called him the confidence man.
The long con has a stable structure, catalogued by the linguist David Maurer in 1940. A roper finds the mark and befriends them. An insideman plays the expert, working out of a setting built for the purpose. A convincer, a small early payout in real money, makes the scheme feel proven. The send dispatches the mark to fetch a larger sum, and the blow-off ends the relationship in a way that discourages complaint.
Three mechanisms do most of the work. Assumed identity costs nothing to claim and is rarely tested, the problem Code Signing exists to solve in the machine case. Borrowed social proof transfers credibility without transferring verification: an introduction from a trusted party is treated as though they checked, when they were only introduced too. And the mark's own incentive sustains belief — often they think they are in on something slightly crooked, which suppresses reporting, and by the send they have sunk enough that disbelief is expensive. A story arriving pre-endorsed deserves what any Plausible Mechanism gets: a demand for Provenance.
High-status milieus are permeable for structural reasons. Credentials go unchecked because checking reads as an insult, membership is treated as transitive, and each gatekeeper assumes an earlier one verified. Prompt Injection has the same shape — instructions inheriting authority from the channel that carried them — and the remedy is the same: check against Ground Truth rather than against confidence.
See also5
Hand-picked in the note itself — the neighbours worth reading next.
Provenance
The recorded origin of a change or a claim — who made it, when, and on what evidence.
Method26 connections
Ground Truth
The measurement that arbitrates, as opposed to the artifact that merely reports.
Method62 connections
Anchoring Effect
A stated number pulls subsequent estimates toward it, regardless of relevance.
Method19 connections
Least Privilege
Granting only the permissions actually required, so a compromise has a small ceiling.
Systems & Tooling14 connections
Naming
Choosing identifiers so the code states its own meaning without commentary.
Method31 connections
Linked from2
Notes elsewhere in the wiki that reach for this one.