How Not To Be Conned By Master of Deception

Letter to Romans: Admit it. You or someone you know has gotten scammed. Even con artists get conned by other cons. Sometimes they even con themselves. Consider how a “Master of Deception Conned Investors Out of $50 Million – in His Own Words …”

As the WSJ summed up the classic example of a scammer who couldn’t get enough of hearing himself talk, “Paul Regan recorded himself ripping off clients to teach others how to do it, too … Those tapes reveal the inner workings of a fraud,” and led to his arrest & a March guilty plea to three felony fraud charges in federal court. As it happened, Regan, 49, along with co-conspirators, “misappropriated most of the more than $60 million he raised from over 300 investors in two firms. How’d he do it? “Regan claimed to have discovered the investment holy grail of high return at low risk, offering investors the chance to earn 10%, even 15% or more annually for up to 10 years, guaranteed. [Sound familiar?] That might seem too good to be true – and it was. But Regan pulled from a bag of tricks to rip off his clients. And he recorded many of his phone calls to teach others how to rip people off, too…”

But here’s the nugget of advice for the rest of us that can’t be recorded & repeated enough: The fraudsters like Regan use “psychological tactics” on their victims like virtuosos. Put another way, they can’t con unless the victim is primed to ask for it. In Regan’s case, the paper opined, he “made a multipronged assault on clients’ emotions by playing on their vulnerabilities, their need for income & their yearning to believe.” We all should remember to believe this: “If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.”

Davd Soul