Film — Live - Action
Job: It turned out there was no Mr. Clarence Pruitt of Rhode Island. It even turned out there was no such town as Big Falls in Rhode Island.
George: You mean he made them both up?
Job: He created everything but Rhode Island. Naturally, we started to investigate other orders that hadn't been confirmed: We found he'd sold $50,000 worth of railroad bonds to a man whose address placed him squarely in the middle of the Hudson River. Another block was sold to a man who could have had only the mildest interest in stocks and bonds, having been dead for 23 years.
George: You mean he made them both up?
Job: He created everything but Rhode Island. Naturally, we started to investigate other orders that hadn't been confirmed: We found he'd sold $50,000 worth of railroad bonds to a man whose address placed him squarely in the middle of the Hudson River. Another block was sold to a man who could have had only the mildest interest in stocks and bonds, having been dead for 23 years.
Literature
"You think about money in the old-fashioned way. Money is not a thing, it is not even a process. It is a kind of shared dream. We dream that a small disc of common metal is worth the price of a substantial meal. Once you wake up from that dream, you can swim in a sea of money."
— Reacher Gilt, Going Postal
Being a con artist means thinking that you're smarter than everyone else and that you've thought of everything. That you can get away with anything. That you can con anyone.
I wish I could say that I don't think about the con when I deal with people, but the difference between me and my mother is that I don't con myself.
Live-Action TV
Captain Jack Harkness: I wanted to sell it to you and then destroy it before you found out it was junk.
Rose Tyler: You said it was a warship.
Jack: They have ambulances in wars.
Rose Tyler: You said it was a warship.
Jack: They have ambulances in wars.
Podcasts
"WWE are in a month-long, co-branding business venture with Susan G. Komen For the Cure, a breast cancer awareness group, a.k.a. a scam artist that only gives 21% of their money towards detection and research, y'know, despite 'For the Cure' being in their name. Screening, mammograms. I won't belabor the point, but they can fuck right off."
— OSW Review, Ep. 44
Theatre
"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an earful of cider."
— Sky Masterson quotes his father, Guys and Dolls
Webcomics
"Wow, your business is so legit, it doesn't even have to look real!"
— Fighter, 8-Bit Theater
Web Original
It's almost as if he had a massive financial stake in scaring people into believing that the MMR vaccine was dangerous.
— Lillian Marx
on "Doctor" Andrew Wakefield, Cracked ("5 Ridiculous Lies That Fooled the Whole World")
on "Doctor" Andrew Wakefield, Cracked ("5 Ridiculous Lies That Fooled the Whole World")Every year brings new and incontrovertible evidence that Lance Armstrong is the polar opposite of the inspiring legend he was once made out to be. It's like peeling back the layers of an onion that's nestled inside an asshole. Just this year, Armstrong... got fired by Nike and his own Livestrong charity. Also, Outside magazine found that Livestrong "donates almost nothing to scientific research." I put nothing past him anymore. By 2014, I expect him to be charged with supplying elephant growth hormone to Roger Clemens and orchestrating the civil war in Syria.
— Drew Magary, "Least Influential People of 2012"
, "Least Influential People of 2012"You're not gonna believe this, but it turns out some tech startups aren't all they claim to be! I'm as shocked as you are. Holmes was the Silicon Valley wunderkind in charge of Theranos, a biotech company once valued at $9 billion that turned out to be built on nothing but junk tech and doctored lab results. She is the Milli Vanilli of blood testing, as it were. And I remain consistently amazed that, despite being so widely parodied, there are still a great number of people out there who buy into her kind of pseudobabble... She's not saying anything! Also, she sounds like a teenager imitating her dad on the phone so that she can score a Vicodin prescription.
—Drew Magary on Elizabeth Holmes, "Least Influential People of 2016"
on Elizabeth Holmes, "Least Influential People of 2016"During his program, Beck also regularly encourages his listeners and viewers to buy gold. And while he doesn't advertise for Goldline directly during his scare tactic rants about how the economy is going to collapse, and gold will be the only thing with value after the liberal apocalypse, we are fortunate enough that once we're scared shitless, and desperate to buy gold, we get a convenient commercial by Glenn Beck himself, telling us that Goldline conveniently has gold for sale.
— Rational Wiki on Glenn Beck
Western Animation
"Such nice boys... It does my heart good to con a couple of class-A suckeroonis like those two! AH HA HA HAAAH!"
— The Con Man, SpongeBob SquarePants, "Chocolate with Nuts"
Real Life
It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century Fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many.
— U.S. Congressman Leo J. Ryan on L. Ron Hubbard
