The Art of the Steal Read Online Free Page B

United States every year, but people don’t care about the problem because they think it doesn’t really affect them. What they don’t understand is that ultimately, it does affect them. It means we all pay higher fees for goods and services.

    The police are frustrated. They complain that if they go out and arrest a check writer, then the district attorney doesn’t want to fool with the guy because it’s not a high profile case. The guy just wrote some bad checks. If they do prosecute him, the judge says the prison is full. He can’t put this check writer behind bars; he needs the cells for murderers and rapists, the really scary guys. Thus, something like 98 percent of forgers go free. Prosecutors have a benchmark. Rarely will they prosecute a fraud of less than five thousand dollars. So criminals know that if they stay under the benchmarks, they’re safe.
    There’s no reason to rob a bank the old-fashioned way, with a mask, a gun, and a prayer. Why go and stick a gun in someone’s face? You’re talking about armed robbery, ten to twenty years. You could end up shooting someone. Someone could shoot you. And for what? The average bank robbery in 1998 and 1999 netted less than one thousand five hundred dollars. You’re a lot better off doing your robbing with the point of a pen. Why not walk in and cash a fraudulent check for twenty thousand dollars? Maybe you’d get six months in the county jail, if they caught you, if they prosecuted you, if they sent you to jail. And so the machinery of fraud functions almost untouched.
    Another big difference is, thirty-five years ago you had to be a con man with a con man’s idiosyncratic personality. You had to be facile. You had to be persuasive, with good improvisational skills, and you needed icy self-control. You were taking something and replicating it, not perfectly, and you had to make someone believe it was the real thing, make them believe it sufficiently that they would cash it. Today, criminals can make a traveler’s check or counterfeit bill that is so good that it doesn’t take any acting skills to walk up to a teller and pass it off as the real thing. Someone who truly looks like a crook can get away with it.
    Bear in mind, the person accepting counterfeit bills and forged checks these days is far less trained than in the past. Years ago, bank tellers were professional employees with months of training. Banks don’t want to pay benefits anymore, and so they don’t bother with full-time employees. They hire part-time help, and they don’t give them any more than the most superficial training. If a bank teller can’t tell the difference between a good hundred-dollar bill and a phony one, what hope is there for a hotel clerk or a sales clerk at the Gap?
    Wherever I go, I find that security is pretty dreadful. Four years ago, I went to the Las Vegas Airport United Airlines ticket counter and was asked to show my driver’s license in order to pick up my ticket. In my haste to catch my plane, the ticket clerk forgot to return the license. When I got back to the Midwest, where I live, I went to the Driver’s License Bureau, told them that I had lost my license, and they issued me a new one on the spot. A week later, an envelope arrived from United with my license. Now I had two. Since I travel a lot, I kept the old one in my briefcase so it would be handy to display at airports. Soon, the old license expired, but, as an experiment, I kept offering it for identification to see if anyone would notice that it was no longer valid. For four years—at airports, banks, and stores—hundreds of salespeople and clerks have looked at that license. Not one has noticed that it was invalid. I’ve decided that as soon as just one person says to me, “This is no good, the license has expired,” I’ll throw it away. But no one has. Is there any wonder we have this mad frenzy of fraud?
    KIDS TODAY
    What bothers me a lot is, it used to be just the hardened criminal you had