History Main / ViolinScam

* ''Film/DjangoUnchained'': Dr Schultz pulls a version of this when he wants to buy a house slave named Hildie from Calvin Candie, but fears that Candie will extort him for a high price since she's not for sale. To get a better price, Schultz pretends to have an interest in one of the slaves that Candie does have for sale, an extremely expensive BloodSport fighter named Eskimo Joe. Schultz says that he needs time to make the necessary arrangements on such a large purchase, but ''would'' like to make an impromptu purchase of Hildie right now for the cash he has on him. He's counting on Candie to treat Hildie as an afterthought to the Eskimo Joe sale and give a fair price for her, after which Schultz will retract his interest in Eskimo Joe.

* In ''Discworld/GoingPostal'', this is mentioned (as part of his {{Backstory}}, of course) as one of [[ConMan Moist von]] [[BoxedCrook Lipwig]]'s ways of keeping in practice. Moist also practices a variation, intended to soothe the suspicions of people who have heard of the common form of the scam: he pretends to be down on his luck, generally trapped in a poor village where he doesn't have ready access to cash, and generously offers to sell a ring to a passer-by for, say, $50, claiming it's worth ten times as much. To assuage the fears of the prospective buyer, they nip down to the local jeweler or smith, except the ring that gets valued isn't the one that gets sold, because Moist is very good at sleight of hand.

-->'''Hawkeye:''' What's that, a new watch?\\

--->- "[[Recap/MashS4E16DearMa Dear Ma]]" ''{{Series/MASH}}''

* ''Series/{{Hustle}}'' has featured a variation on this known as "dog in a bar", where a supposedly valuable dog stands in for the violin (the clip can be found on the BBC's Website/YouTube channel [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmZHpgFulG0 here]]). The song "Can't Con An Honest John" by ''TheStreets'' details the same dog-in-a-bar variation.

** Later in the season, in "The Underground Job", they discuss running a fiddle game again. This time they plan to sell a corrupt mine owner that the mine has something valuable in it and sell him a process to obtain it.

* In an episode of Series/{{CSINY}}, a young woman [[LatexPerfection disguised as an old man,]] is murdered in a train at rush hour. The investigation finds out she's the daughter of an infamous scam artist, and was engaged, but her fiance not knowing of her past is ruled out as a suspect. The investigation uncovers victims who would trust the kindly "old man" by giving him all the cash they had on them in exchange of a greater sum, only for the "old man" to never come back. Eventually they find the real killer, her ex-boyfriend who tells the [=CSIs'=] what happened. They had been dating for several months when she talked him into scamming two regular customers at the bar she worked at, but the following day she told him that the scam fell through, and they were demanding several thousand dollars or they would kill her. To save her life he emptied his bank account, cashed in his insurance, sold his truck, and even convinced his brother to sell his car. After he gave her the money, he never saw or heard from her again, and the men that demanded the money were just some random customers who knew nothing of a scam. Some time later, he was on the train when he smelled her perfume, saw a lock of hair coming out of her mask, and recognized the old cigar box she always carried around. As they fought in the middle of the crowded subway he killed her in the scuffle.
* ''{{Series/MASH}}'': "[[Recap/MashS4E16DearMa Dear Ma]]": When a patient is leaving on the evac bus, he begs B.J. to buy his "$150" watch, which the good doctor eventually capitulates to for $20. When bragging to Hawkeye, Hawkeye quickly guesses his friend was scammed when he hears of the deal. [[spoiler:As luck would have it, that patient ends up back at the 4077 after the bus was attacked under B.J.'s knife]].

* ''{{Series/Mash}}'': "[[Recap/MashS4E16DearMa Dear Ma]]": When a patient is leaving on the evac bus, he begs B.J. to buy his "$150" watch, which the good doctor eventually capitulates to for $20. When bragging to Hawkeye, Hawkeye quickly guesses his friend was scammed when he hears of the deal. [[spoiler:As luck would have it, that patient ends up back at the 4077 after the bus was attacked under B.J.'s knife]].

--->- "[[Recap/MashS4E16DearMa Dear Ma]]" ''{{Series/Mash}}

** In "The Studio Job", the team refers to the con as a fiddle game, which confuses [[NoSocialSkills Parker]] and she keeps asking [[LiteralMinded where the fiddle comes in]]. [[LateToThePunchline When she finally understands]], she says [[ItMakesSenseInContext "Oh, Eliot's the fiddle!"]]. Later in the season, in "The Underground Job", they discuss running a fiddle game again.

** One episode was spent modifying a motorbike to convince a collector that it was the one [[Film/LawrenceOfArabia T.E. Lawrence]] had been riding when he died. Varied chiefly in that the "authenticating expert" role was left to ''TheMark himself'' to play: all the "evidence" was circumstantial and never mentioned explicitly by the cons, and in some cases (a bent handlebar, a rattle in the gas tank), they even tried to hide it for fear of devaluing the bike - which, in a smaller variation, was not completely worthless on its own merit, just not worth quite so much.

* In an episode of Series/{{CSINY}}, a young woman [[LatexPerfection disguised as an old man]] is murdered in a train at rush hour. The investigation finds out she's the daughter of an infamous scam artist, and was engaged, but her fiance not knowing of her past is ruled out as a suspect. Eventually the investigation uncovers victims who would trust the kindly "old man" by giving him all the cash they had on them in exchange of a greater sum, only for the "old man" to never come back. Eventually they find the real killer, spoiler: her ex-boyfriend who tells the [=CSIs'=] what happened. They had been dating for several months when she talked him into scamming two regular customers at the bar she worked at by first handing her a hefty sum of money. The following day she tells him that the scam fell through, and they were demanding several thousand dollars or they would kill her, and to save her life he emptied his bank account, cashed in his insurance, sold his truck, and even convinced his brother to sell his car. After he gave her the money, she never saw her again, until he smelled her perfume, saw a lock of hair coming out of her mask, and recognized the old cigar box she always carried around, he grabbed in the middle of a crowded subway and in the scuffle, he killed her.

* ''Film/DjangoUnchained'' has Dr Schultz planning something somewhat similar to the greedy customer in the Oral Tradition story below, except with a slave (who he's trying to free,) as the property in question. He and Django discover that Django's wife Hildie is currently owned by Calvin Candie, but rather than simply trying to buy Hildie (which Candie might refuse, or demand an obscenely high price,) Schultz asks to buy an extremely expensive BloodSport fighter named Eskimo Joe, and puts on an extended performance with Django to sell their story. After being wined and dined at Candie's estate and eventually agreeing to buy the fighter for $12,000, Schultz tells Candie that he can't possibly part with such a sum until he's had a chance to draw up the paperwork with his own lawyer, have Eskimo Joe checked by a doctor etc. but will be happy to return with the necessary people in five days time to pick up Eskimo Joe and pay Candie. However, in the mean time, he's taken quite a liking to a certain other (much cheaper) slave named Hildie, whom he would be very happy to pay for right now... [[spoiler: Candie falls for it hook, line and sinker, but his own slave sees through it and turns the tables, making Schultz play the part of the greedy customer right to the end and pay the full $12,000 for Hildie instead of Eskimo Joe. While he's doing so, Candie comments if they had just asked for Hilde right away, [[CouldHaveAvoidedThisPlot he would've just sold her to them for a cheap price]]]].

* In ''Another Midnight Run'', a MadeForTVMovie based on the original ''Film/MidnightRun'' film as part of the Creator/ActionPack, a pair of [[ConMan grifters]] Jack is trying to bring in use the wedding ring variation to score some cash in order to buy a car when they & Jack are stranded in a small town. The male of the two narrates the ploy to Jack while she sets up the marks, telling them she lost her ring. He explains that the heart of the con is the greedy nature of the mark. "You can't cheat an honest man."
* ''Series/BetterCallSaul'' reveals that this was one of many cons Jimmy [=McGill=] (Saul Goodman) could pull off before trying to go on the straight and narrow with his legal career. He and some random mark he'd been chatting with in a bar would find a drunk (actually Jimmy's friend Marco, pretending to be drunk) in the alley with a fancy suit and a (fake) Rolex. They'd take the Rolex off him, and Jimmy would pretend not to know what it was worth. The mark would accuse Jimmy of trying to take the (apparently) much more lucrative watch, and offer Jimmy all of the money the mark has on him in exchange for the watch. Jimmy and Marco, naturally, have a bunch more of those fake watches at home. During a montage in the episode "Marco," where Jimmy and Marco go on a week of scamming people, the two appear to pull this scam off with the conventional violin.

** In the same episode, they pull this off with an allegedly rare coin.

* ''Series/{{Hustle}}'' has featured a variation on this known as "dog in a bar", where a supposedly valuable dog stands in for the violin (the clip can be found on the BBC's YouTube channel [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmZHpgFulG0 here]]). The song "Can't Con An Honest John" by ''TheStreets'' details the same dog-in-a-bar variation.

* In the ''KingkillerChronicle'' novel ''[[TheWiseMansFear The Wise Man's Fear]]'', Denna's foolish boyfriend Geoffrey falls for a variant known as "the weeping widow". In this variant, a woman stands weeping outside a pawnshop and when questioned by an apparent GoodSamaritan claims that the man who was helping her sell her valuable wedding ring pawned it for a fraction of its value and ran off with the money. The woman and the "Good Samaritan" agree to meet the following day at noon to get the ring out of hock and sell it together. Usually, the "Good Samaritan" buys the ring on his own before the woman comes back, and the woman and her accomplice the pawnbroker spilt the money. Geoffrey, however, was one of those rare men who show up right on time. Denna, who has run this con herself, finds it dishonorable of her fellow conwoman to keep a decent guy's money.

* In ''Another Midnight Run'', a MadeforTVMovie based on the original ''Film/MidnightRun'' film as part of the Creator/ActionPack, a pair of [[ConMan grifters]] Jack is trying to bring in use the wedding ring variation to score some cash in order to buy a car when they & Jack are stranded in a small town. The male of the two narrates the ploy to Jack while she sets up the marks, telling them she lost her ring. He explains that the heart of the con is the greedy nature of the mark. "You can't cheat an honest man."

* ''Film/DjangoUnchained'' has Dr Schultz planning something somewhat similar to the greedy customer in the Oral Tradition story below, except with a slave (who he's trying to free,) as the property in question. He and Django discover that Django's wife Hildie is currently owned by Calvin Candie, but rather than simply trying to buy Hildie (which Candie might refuse, or demand an obscenely high price,) Schultz asks to buy an extremely expensive BloodSport fighter named Eskimo Joe, and puts on an extended performance with Django to sell their story. After being wined and dined at Candie's estate and eventually agreeing to buy the fighter for $12,000, Schultz tells Candie that he can't possibly part with such a sum until he's had a chance to draw up the paperwork with his own lawyer, have Eskimo Joe checked by a doctor etc. but will be happy to return with the necessary people in five days time to pick up Eskimo Joe and pay Candie. However, in the mean time, he's taken quite a liking to a certain other (much cheaper) slave named Hildie, whom he would be very happy to pay for right now... [[spoiler: Candie falls for it hook, line and sinker, but his own slave sees through it and turns the tables, making Schultz play the part of the greedy customer right to the end and pay the full $12,000 for Hildie instead of Eskimo Joe]].

** One episode was spent modifying a motorbike to convince a collector that it was the one [[LawrenceOfArabia T.E. Lawrence]] had been riding when he died. Varied chiefly in that the "authenticating expert" role was left to ''TheMark himself'' to play: all the "evidence" was circumstantial and never mentioned explicitly by the cons, and in some cases (a bent handlebar, a rattle in the gas tank), they even tried to hide it for fear of devaluing the bike - which, in a smaller variation, was not completely worthless on its own merit, just not worth quite so much.

* This scam is quite possible in ''VideoGame/EVEOnline'' and it does not even have to be a two man con! First you have to find a cheap item with very low supply in market and buy majority of them. Once you cleaned the market create a sell order with very high prices and sell your goods in a different system with slightly lower prices (prefably with different account). It looks like easy money for the prey: buy the goods, move them to other system and sell them for higher prices. Of course you will cancel your buy order before he can sell them back. Tricky part is finding the right violin.

** An earlier episode featured a Greek antiques dealer (played by ''[[BrianBlessed BRIAN BLESSED!]]'') who conned a Japanese business man into purchasing a Satsuma tea-bowl for millions. The tea-bowl was authentic, but the provenance stating that the bowl was once owned by Emperor Hirohito and that the Emperor had drunk from it just before signing the Armistice that ended World War II was forged. Lovejoy and the businessman (along with a wealthy and attractive American widow whom BRIAN BLESSED had scammed earlier) got back at him with an elaborate scam involving a forgery of a Russian religious icon (a market TheMark was attempting to corner) that the businessman had in his possession, complete with an authenticating expert, and a trick where Lovejoy hand-sewed two bags, one for the fake icon and one for the real icon, from antique velvet spritzed with incense (so it would smell like it had been left inside a Russian church for decades) and sprinkled the interiors of the bags with paint chips from destroyed antique paintings so they could provide TheMark with all the "paint samples" he would require to authenticate the icon.

* A variant was done in ''OnlyFoolsAndHorses'' episode "Cash and Curry" where the conmen were of Indian descent and the supposedly valuable object was a statue of a Hindu god. The con was played with a variation, where the two conmen claimed that they were unable to talk to each other because they were of different castes; and of course, the episode ended with a thoroughly Anvilicious scene where the conmen pointed out that [[AuthorTract only a prejudiced person attempting to swindle clueless immigrants would fall for such a scam.]]

* This scam is quite possible in ''EVEOnline'' and it does not even have to be a two man con! First you have to find a cheap item with very low supply in market and buy majority of them. Once you cleaned the market create a sell order with very high prices and sell your goods in a different system with slightly lower prices (prefably with different account). It looks like easy money for the prey: buy the goods, move them to other system and sell them for higher prices. Of course you will cancel your buy order before he can sell them back. Tricky part is finding the right violin.
* This is also possible in ''FinalFantasyXI'', thanks to its variety of market outlets. But note that, since a large number of players watch the auction houses like hawks, they will probably cry foul and refuse to be conned.

* An amusing variation happened in ''TopCat'': a pair of con artists trick an immigrant hot dog vendor from the neighborhood into buying worthless stocks in a floundering Nova Scotia oil company. T.C. then [[MockMillionaire tricks the scammers into thinking he's a Texan millionaire]]. While they are meeting in his "office" (the alley, only spruced up), T.C. leaves for a moment only for the "teletype" (the output of which actually comes from Benny hiding under a table with a typewriter) to state that the well struck oil and the value of the shares skyrocketed. The scammers then rush to the hot dog vendor and buy back the shares at triple the price. In other words T.C. managed to pull the violin scam for a worthless item ''the marks had previously owned!''

[[AC:{{Film}}]]

[[AC:{{Literature}}]]

[[AC:LiveActionTV]]

[[AC:Oral Tradition]]

[[AC:Video Games]]
* This scam is quite possible in ''EVEOnline'' and it does not even have to be a two man con! First you have to find a cheap item with very low supply in market and buy majority of them. Once you cleaned the market create a sell order with very high prices and sell your goods in a different system with slightly lower prices (prefably with different account). It looks like easy money for the prey: buy the goods, move them to other system and sell them for higher prices. Of course you will cancel your buy order before he can sell them back. Tricky part is finding the right violin.

* This happens quite often in ''VideoGame/{{World of Warcraft}}''. Typically it is a single con man in this case, but it requires either 2 separate characters or 2 separate accounts (separate accounts make it more convincing). On one account/character, he posts an item on the auction house for significantly more than it's worth. On the other account/character, he says in trade "WTB <item>" for twice the amount that he posted it for on the auction house. The unsuspecting mark will buy the item on the auction house (paying way more than it's worth), then when he turns around to sell it to the person in trade, he finds they're gone.

[[AC:WesternAnimation]]
* An amusing variation happened in ''TopCat'': a pair of con artists trick an immigrant hot dog vendor from the neighborhood into buying worthless stocks in a floundering Nova Scotia oil company. T.C. then [[MockMillionaire tricks the scammers into thinking he's a Texan millionaire]]. While they are meeting in his "office" (the alley, only spruced up), T.C. leaves for a moment only for the "teletype" (the output of which actually comes from Benny hiding under a table with a typewriter) to state that the well struck oil and the value of the shares skyrocketed. The scammers then rush to the hot dog vendor and buy back the shares at triple the price. In other words T.C. managed to pull the violin scam for a worthless item ''the marks had previously owned!''

* Creator/HollyBlack's ''Literature/TheWhiteCat'' has a variation of this involving a white cat. Cassel needs to get a cat out of a shelter. He's under 18 and can't just adopt it, so his friend comes into the shelter claiming her expensive white cat is lost and offering a huge reward. Cassel then goes in and claims he has the missing cat, but will need a white cat for his little sister as a replacement. The shelter worker, thinking of the huge reward, is willing to skip the background check and give Cassel the cat, expecting Cassel to return later with the "missing" cat.

* HollyBlack's ''Curse Workers: the White Cat'' has a variation of this involving a white cat. Cassel needs to get a cat out of a shelter. He's under 18 and can't just adopt it, so his friend comes into the shelter claiming her expensive white cat is lost and offering a huge reward. Cassel then goes in and claims he has the missing cat, but will need a white cat for his little sister as a replacement. The shelter worker, thinking of the huge reward, is willing to skip the background check and give Cassel the cat, expecting Cassel to return later with the "missing" cat.

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* ''Series/BetterCallSaul'' reveals that this was one of many cons Jimmy [=McGill=] (Saul Goodman) could pull off before trying to go on the straight and narrow with his legal career. He and some random mark he'd been chatting with in a bar would find a drunk in the alley with a fancy suit and a (fake) Rolex. They'd take the Rolex off him, and Jimmy would pretend not to know what it was worth. The mark would accuse Jimmy of trying to take the (apparently) much more lucrative watch, and offer Jimmy all of the money the mark has on him in exchange for the watch. Of course, the "drunk" was Jimmy's friend, and they had a bunch more of those fake watches at home.

* ''Series/BetterCallSaul'' reveals that this was one of many cons Jimmy McGill (Saul Goodman) could pull off before trying to go on the straight and narrow with his legal career. He and some random mark he'd been chatting with in a bar would find a drunk in the alley with a fancy suit and a Rolex. They'd take the Rolex off him, and Jimmy would pretend not to know what it was worth. The mark would pay Jimmy all the money he had on him to get it. Of course, the "drunk" was Jimmy's friend (Marco), and they had a bunch more of those watches at home.