The Con Within a Con

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

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 Napier). 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.

  • You get acquainted with or befriend the mark.
  • You convince them that you are going to con the Napier (Napier being played by one of your con crew, optional)
  • You get them to front up some money for the con and then you (and usually the Napier) run off with it.

This is a subtrope of Kansas City Shuffle and is a supertrope of the Violin Scam.

Spoiler warning: This is a trope about twists and turns and surprise endings. Possible unmarked spoilers lie ahead.

Examples of The Con Within a Con include:

Film

  • In the movie The Sting, Paul Newman's character Gondorff plays a Napier, 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.


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.

Web Comics

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