Authorities Deception

An authoritative deception is played out as a drama that misrepresents material facts to elicit confidence in the buyer. Here a con man plays on the emotions of a prospective client representing himself as an authority no customer would think of challenging. For instance, a used car dealer represents a car as good. A naive buyer purchases the car only to find out it had a bad engine. The salesman pleads ignorance to the fact that it was bad, yet the intonations in his sales pitch assure the buyer the car was good because he is an authority on such things. The buyer’s expectation is that the sales person had sufficient experience to know a good car from a bad one. In fact, the seller, who is the owner of the dealership, is quite aware of what constitutes a good car and what constitutes a bad one since he frequently buys cars from many sources. By virtue of being in the car business, and needing to make wise judgments about the condition of the cars they buy, the car dealer could be considered to have "constructive knowledge" of the condition of the car.
Sometimes in transactions the client plays the role of a willing fool. What they want is a good story so they can boast to their friends. For instance, people want to believe they have the best dentist, best doctor or mechanic. The local mechanic plays into this by presenting himself as an authority beyond his credentials. The more strongly he asserts his authority the less people question him and the more he can charge for the work on a car that he has done.

• Story telling
• Misrepresentation
• Confidence Game
• Deception
• Constructive Fraud

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Dianic Publications
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