A con normally involves an element in which the Con Man
gets the target to trust them and/or to focus on achieving their greedy ends such that it overrides their normal sense of precaution. This is a form of con where that hook is trying to entice them in on playing a con themselves. The process of the con gives the con artist many opportunities to feign cautious or try and entice the mark in feeling they have to prove something to the con man. The Con Within A Con
can be controlled by having the fake target be a member of the con artists own crew (sometimes called a Conman in Mark's Clothing
). The pay off normally comes when The Con Within A Con
requires the target to provide some front money which the con artist then runs off with.
This is similar to the Kansas City Shuffle
and the Violin Scam
(and related scams), but with some key differences:
Spoiler warning: This is a trope about twists and turns and surprise endings. Possible unmarked spoilers lie ahead.
- In The Con Within A Con, Grifter convinces the Mark that Mark has an opportunity to help Grifter con a third party.
- In Violin Scam, Grifter tricks Mark into thinking that Mark has an opportunity to con (or just steal from) Grifter.
- In Kansas City Shuffle, Grifter lets Mark figure out that Grifter is trying to con Mark—but misleads Mark about what the actual con is. Mark thinks he can exploit his knowledge to steal Grifter's money, and that makes him vulnerable to the real con.
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- In the movie The Sting, Paul Newman's character Gondorff plays a Conman in Mark's Clothing, when he is working as the obnoxious bookie "Shaw".
- Inception: while Fischer is dreaming, the team convince him to enter and extract from Browning's dreams, while he's actually going into a further level of his own.
- Nine Queens and its American remake Criminal. In this case what we are actually following is not the overall con but The Con Within A Con itself and then at the end the real con is a Twist Ending.
- In House Of Games, the female lead gets trapped and loses $80,000 in an elaborate Massive Multiplayer Scam involving a fake mark.
- This occurs in Matchstick Men, where the "big hit" on Chuck, Angela's arrival, and Roy's visits with Dr. Klein are all part of a massive con by Frank against Roy.
Live Action TV
- On Hustle, Danny or Albert tend to play the role of the fake mark.
- The Hustle episode "The Lesson".
- In LOST: Sawyer is caught out by this woman when trying to run a scam (something similar to a Thai Gem Scam), eventually he befriends her and takes her on several short cons, using her as a shill. Then he comes up with a longer con which would go for a bigger target but would require a little show money. She then reveals that she has some money that she got from a divorce which they can use. Psych! Turns out that this was just a really long con where Sawyer had been told by her vengeful ex-husband about the money and was there to get it from her.
- Kurosaki's MO in Kurosagi
- An episode of Mission: Impossible involves the team trying to get the mark (an unscrupulous African stockbroker) to "take over" an operation producing near-perfect counterfeit money.