6. The Wire Game

Made famous by the movie The Sting, the wire game was a complex fraud that required a large group of con men to work in concert in order to pull it off. The group of grifters would open up a fake “wire store,’ which is a kind of bookie where bets could be placed on horse races. A victim, usually a man of considerable wealth, would then be brought in and given some fake insider information that a particular horse was a sure thing to win the race. If the con men sold the mark well enough, the hope was that they would place a huge bet with the fake bookie at the wire store. From here, the con can go any number of ways, but in the most popular version some sort of mistake occurs, or confusion over the outcome of the race (which, of course, never actually took place) leads to the bet being declared a loss for the hapless victim.