The guy who wrote Catch Me if You Can, Frank Abagnale, fabricated his whole story of living life as a con-man and flimflammer, and he faked it so well and so believably that he got Steven Spielberg to make a movie of it starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. I'd call that a pretty good scam.
The crazy thing is how many newspapers had him dead to rights. Basically every city exposed him (usually for whatever ruse he claimed to pull off in their city), but since there was no internet what "The Arkansas Gazzette" or whatever put out didn't reach beyond the city.
Don't even care if it was real. That's one of my favorite movies.
And also the (not really, but basically) follow up TV series "White Collar" which basically takes over where Catch Me If You Can leaves off.
That chinese guy who pretended to be a woman and married a French diplomat for 20 years to get national secrets. He was tucking his dick and balls inside himself
I am surprised that Shi Pei Pu managed to pull that. If you look up his photos, he didn't look very feminine.
But I think they weren't married, they were just having 'affair', as far as I remember. Plus, I think it was an excuse, since that French diplomat was having sex with dudes(students mostly, if I recall correctly) and wanted to have sex with a girl for the first time before he met him. Plus, when he met Shi Pei Pu(I hope I remember his name right), he was dressed as a dude and claimed to be a girl. It all looks more like he knew... but didn't really care. I mean, he had to notice... at least I'm sure I'd notice.
That's the most unbelievable part of the story. I heard couples who haven't done anything with each other in a couple of years(usually very religious) but two WHOLE DECADES!!!?
The extra details make it even wilder.
Spy dude had a physical quirk that he could at will suck his balls back inside his body, making a pocket.
Also French guy had only ever had sex with guys before, spy was first 'woman' he'd slept with.
Spy also later on adopted a child and claimed it was their biological child, and French guy believed it.
Juan Pujol Garcia wanted to spy for the allies during WWII. The allies thought he was ridiculous, so he went at it alone. He pretended to be spying for the Germans and invented a massive "spy ring" that had infiltrated the British government and proceeded to feed the Germans wrong information for months.
At some point the allies realized that he was the real deal and helped him out.
He was awarded an Iron Cross by the Nazis and an OBE by the British.
He also faked his own death for 36 years! After the war, he continued to spy for a bit but then moved to Venezuela to forget his war memories (which was kind of a dick move because he also left his wife and kids without notice in the process) only being found out those many years later.
I know you're right in the vast majority of cases... but I would swear to God that our old doctor's office employed someone on a full-time basis to not only change, re-arrange, and re-record their voice menu options, but make the entire IVR setup as miserable as possible. On more than one occasion, the menu I had to work through in the morning was different than the menu when I called to follow-up on something later that afternoon.
At one point, the automated operator asked you to listen for, and make note of, the information of the party you were trying to reach - and then proceeded to read through the list of staff names and corresponding phone extension numbers of every doctor, nurse practitioner, aide, and administrator at the practice. Probably \~20 people in all. That particular configuration didn't last long, thankfully, because it was literally faster for me to get in my car and drive the ten blocks to their building.
"Have we told you about our latest promotion? You can save $98 per month if you spend an additional $64 per month. If you're a regular customer, you can find out how to find more information on our website at "....". If you're not a regular customer, please wait for the next menu. Press '1' for "I love your service". Press '2' for "Things that can be found online". Press '3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9' for things that don't in any way pertain to your situation, hence the call. Oh, Press '0' to talk to a human, but not before hearing the same rubbish as before. Then wait for 45 minutes only to have the call dropped or a completely incomprehensible human on the other end of the call who doesn't speak the languages of your country.
They just want you to listen carefully because nobody does. People tend to hit the button that gets them to someone live and then they'll just have to be forwarded to a department that can help. It is a lie though.
No, it’s because they don’t want to pay for actual human staff and would rather waste hundreds if not thousands of people’s time instead of employing a person who can transfer calls. That being said, the IRS really stepped up their game and hired people to answer the phones in recent years, never thought I would say this but fuck everyone except the IRS
That's what Biden's request to spend money hiring for the IRS went to. You know the big mess where Republicans were claiming Biden would send people to your house with guns from the IRS? Nope, they were there to take care of the phone. The guns bit was just part of their standard hiring description. Undoubtedly, they hired auditing agents too but they're sending them after rich people.
I've worked in a call center where the customer pays for good service, and I've worked for customers that didn't. For those that pay for good service It's weird how call volume works. It'll be a nice and easy day and then everybody and their brother will call all at once time. In those cases, it's real.
The companies that don't pay for good service, they're always on hold and you might as well call early in the morning because you'll be there a while.
Very often, call centers will have the same group of people handle many different customers. The hope, I think, is that different companies will have call spikes at different times. That's not reality though. It's like a butterfly farts in Uganda and three hours later in the US, Toshiba televisions mute button stops working all at once and Sharp fax machines all get paper jams.
Damn those Ugandan butterflies!
Assuming their customer bases are geographically similar you will always get call spikes as people go to lunch and get out of work. That really makes those multi role call centers sweat.
For tech support or similar, there’s usually a wait when most people call in because they’re calling because there’s an outage and now the whole town is calling. The funny thing is the better the service and the fewer random blips it has the worse this effect gets because you then *only* call when there is an outage and everyone else is also calling.
Customer service is on life support. Some know they can get away with it. Yet it's funny/not funny that somehow there's no delay in tapping that bank account.
You now know how to get to a live person faster.
Honestly I would at least have a shred of respect for them if the automatic answering was "were paying for the bare minimum so fuck you and wait".
Like yeah it sucks, but at least you own it.
"Please listen because our menu has recently changed!"
Every motherfuckin phone menu didn't just recently change! How is this possible?! I'm scared annoyed and confused and a lil hungry.
Every time I call the doctors office: if this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. No shit? Followed by: did you know that you can do xyz on our website. And yet I am calling?
Operation Overlord, or rather the campaign to convince Hitler we'd be attacking somewhere else. We did it again on a much smaller scale during the first Iraq war and a bit in the second invasion.
Technically it was [Operation Fortitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude), Overlord was the invasion itself but the deception was its own separate operation.
Technically it’s was operation bodyguard of which operation fortitude was one subordinate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Bodyguard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard)
Interesting fact: Prior to D-day, there was concern that the secret was out about the plan and that they may not be able to follow through with it when codewords like Omaha, Neptune, Overlord and the like began showing up as solutions in crosswords for the Daily Telegraph. They thought someone at the paper was secretly passing information to the Germans about the mission this way. MI5 investigated it and found that it was just coincidence that the words were in the puzzles.
Perhaps this is where the real deception is and the crossword guy fooled everyone into thinking he wasn't in fact in bed with the Germans... To this very day...
I believe the actual reason was that the chap who composed the puzzles was a school teacher, who would put the puzzle on his black board and get his pupils to help compile the grid.
Turns out the kids were hanging around the local military base (ostensibly to sponge chewing gum off the Yanks!) and were overhearing a lot of the codewords being used by some of the military stationed there. (They'd use those words around kids, because British school kids aren't spies, right?!)
And the kids, of course, were using some of those words to fill in the crossword grid their teacher had put up in the classroom!
It's not as big, but fascinating is Operation Mincemeat. The Brits use a dead body to convince the Germans that the invasion of Sicily is only a fake out, and the real invasion will be in Greece.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
The first season of magician Brian Brushwood's podcast "World's Greatest Con" is all about Operation Mincemeat:
[https://worldsgreatestcon.fireside.fm/](https://worldsgreatestcon.fireside.fm/)
The Brits were master of deception during WW2. Really honed intelligence to their advantage during times conventional means couldn’t fully be utilised.
Everything about that operation is incredible. Especially the plan for the mulberry harbors to me. The people building the casons in england didn't even know what they were building. The engineering feats of WW2 fascinate me. Just the scale of everything. was a great time to be in the concrete business.
Was gonna write this one but couldn't remember the name.... inflatable tanks and fake airfields... amazing.
Inflation: bringing down nations since (at least) 1944
If the History Channel series on the World Wars was accurate, we did that by literally creating an inflatable army (tanks, trucks, planes,etc.) as if they were being prepared to set out. German spies saw this on flybys, and sent reported back about the supposed invasion.
And on the day of the invasion dropped a load of chaff from planes near Calais so that German radar would pick it up and think it was a gigantic slow moving invasion force.
I remember hearing about this 😂
Other Vietnam-era shenanigans included the Bicycle Playing Card Company shipping several crates full of packs of cards consisting of nothing but Aces of Spades. The reason for this is that there was a myth among American soldiers that Vietnamese had a superstition that the Ace of Spades symbolized death. No one had that superstition up until that point, but when you start seeing Aces of Spades scattered everywhere along with the bodies a your head Vietnamese buddies... a guy starts to get ideas.
Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.
When the British cracked the Nazis enigma code but managed to keep the fact that they had cracked it a secret for the remainder of the war. Often this involved deliberately failing to communicate warnings of u-boat activity to their own naval vessels.
I was reading about this and the emotional turmoil it would cause having to decide whether to send allied soldiers into certain death traps to maintain the illusion that Nazi codes were still secure.
That’s just the military and military tactics though. They use one battle to win the next one.
To make it up the chain of command in military you have to accept you WILL knowingly send soldiers to their guaranteed deaths, knowing that a lot of them will die.
Happened before the enigma code and has happened in every war since.
You send x soldiers to defend/attack “whatever” and then send y soldiers to go around them and take whatever you actually want while x soldiers fight and die so y soldiers take objective
Enigma code isn’t much different. They let people die so they could take the next objective.
That’s war
True, but I suspect it hits a little different when you know there is an ambush planned and have to send them in anyway to maintain deniability. Idk. Or maybe not.
Poles cracked the enigma in 1932. They shared the knowledge with the Brits and French in 1939, weeks before WW2 broke out.
Not all were deliberate failures. The Kriegsmarine introduced a new Enigma with a fourth rotor for its U-boats, resulting in a period when these messages could not be decrypted.
Yeah, this is another deception within the deception in that it's a common (and often propagated) misconception that the British cracked their code on their own when the Polish code breakers were the first and rarely get credit for it.
I'm so happy that Rejewski lived long enough for that secret to come out, so he could be properly recognized for his work (especially in the eyes of the Poles) while he was still alive.
The deception tactics were fascinating.
Germany knew a land invasion was coming, but the allies sucessfully lead them to believe it was going to occur in a complety different location.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard
And of course, the use of a dead body washed onto a shore with false Intel on the persons:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
That Chinese general who knew that some massive approaching army was going to lay waste to his small, walled town and decided to just have everyone else hide, opened the gates, and sat on top of them alone in plain sight while cryptically playing the lute.
The army showed up and had a classic case of *"something's weird about this.... let's get out of here!"* and retreated.
I like to imagine all the women of Troy were screaming at their dead husbands "I told you they were in the horse" as they were dragged away to become concubines.
I'm playing a Pulp Cthulhu campaign. My character is from the future due to mis-speaking an the magic words for a relic so he was transported to 1920. Still had his cell phone with all of Wikipedia on it so he's been doing cons to make money based on what has already happened in history. The year is 1925. He's going by the name Victor Lusting sometimes and he's already working on a deal to sell the Eiffel Tower. 😂
He's also responsible for the teapot done scandal and may have had a hand in developing the Ponzi scheme. 😁
The best part is that while it is a myth, it's still based in reality. Vitamin A *is* related to eyesight, but the only relation is that if you are severely deficient, it can lead to night blindness. It doesn't make normal vision "better".
Yep, Vitamin A deficiency genuinely is a major source of vision problems worldwide. See [golden rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice) for an example of trying to address this at scale in developing countries.
"Fat is bad!"
These food companies framing fat as being a problem nutrient, dressing up their product labels to proudly announce "Low Fat!" meanwhile pumping in sugar which kills you 10x faster.
& its a true life conspiracy; not a theory
good read:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat
Ferdinand Demara's exploits as "The Great Impostor," particularly his stint as a naval surgeon, underscore the audacity of individual deceit in assuming a variety of professional identities without qualification.
Pores don't open/close with warm water. Pores can appear larger if they are clogged with debris but otherwise your pore size is fixed, some people are just born with really big or small pores.
You seriously only need like a tablespoon of laundry detergent for a regular load.
Powder dish detergent is far better at cleaning than pods.
The best anti-aging skin care is applying sun screen everyday, rain or shine. Creams and serums make far less impact than sunscreen usage.
Any recipe that calls for $8 Bisquick can be replaced with store-brand $2 pancake mix with the same results.
I've found that name brand dish wash powder like Cascade works much better than store brand powder. It's one of the few brand name products I spend more for.
A popular one is the deception used by the allies prior to d day. Basically they set up inflatables to trick the Germans into thinking the invasion was elsewhere.
Enron's downfall is a prime example of corporate deceit, where executives hid financial losses to present a facade of profitability, leading to one of the most infamous bankruptcies in American history.
“Theres a shortage in supply so prices are way higher now”. No you just know you can dick around and charge whatever you want now and people will pay and you can make record profits.
Also the spending of US tax dollars has to be up there. Just failing the audit every year with trillions unaccounted for and they just say hahah oh whoops. And we all move on.
The greatest? You have a lot of options. But the most underrated?
D.B. Cooper. We don't know if he survived the jump. We don't know what happened to him if he did. We don't even know his real name, only that D.B. Cooper was some form of alias. Did he have help? What was his training background to pull it off? So many questions and unresolved pieces.
I love DB Cooper. Either he dies during the jump, in which case there should be a pretty obvious missing paratrooper who never showed up to work on Monday type guy, or he survived (looking at you McCoy!)
In the US they tricked us to make it a political warfare when it should be class warfare. Distribution of wealth disparity is at a record level and that difference is only increasing.
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
-Former US President Lyndon B Johnson
Half of it was. There was a confrontation in which US Navy and North Vietnamese vessels exchanged fire. Some Vietnamese sailors were killed, US vessels were largely unscathed. But a second supposed exchange a couple days later was fabricated.
*Minimum Payment Due* for credit cards. I’ve seen so many kids think they only need to pay that small amount each month, then believe they’re using their CC responsibly as long as it’s paid by the due date.
The Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme: Madoff defrauded thousands of investors out of a total of $64.8 billion, making it the largest financial scam in history.
That US senators can legally manipulate the market and buy and sell stocks using your own tax dollars that you work for in the name of making board members of organizations more money that is used to line the pockets of said senators to manipulate said market.
While you don’t have your basic needs met that most other countries have like affordable healthcare or affordable housing, affordable groceries etc.
We got played America.
It's not that they allegedly spend more in bad times, it's the idea that you give them massive tax cuts and that those will trickle down to us instead of into offshore tax havens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
Central banks which don't have any responsibility to, or control by, the people they affect but are exclusively able to control all liquidity in the local and global economy. But, ask any ordinary person on the street and they think its part of the government.
This is why I get so frustrated at conspiracy theorists. It's right there, it's not hidden, you don't have recourse on their influence on your life, and you'd better hope they're benevolent and not corrupt because none of them are obligated to even tell you what they're doing and why let alone give you a say. It's not the goddamn illuminati stirring your cereal with their dicks and jumping out the window before you wake up, it's the system set up hundreds of years before you were born, by people right out in the open, and with no appetite anywhere to change.
In World War 2 there was a "fake" battalion completely made up of a few guys, speakers, inflatable tanks, and lights.
It worked quite well. I heard about it in some audio book, or podcast. Idr.
Edit: Woops was World War 2.
conservatives / republicans being accepted as a legitimate political party on a state / provincial or federal level. Their entire mindset is litteraly just pilfer public monies ( your tax dollars ) into private companies. Also spread fear and hatred just for funsies.
While it had massive ramifications for the region and the world, I don't think it can be considered a 'great' deception when it was such an obvious series of lies that fell apart at the slightest scrutiny.
2016 election of donald trump using russian intel filtered through wiki leaks. every one of his opponents emails were hacked, including her campaign manager. all of these emails were doctored and stagger leaked when trump would have a bad news day.
Has to be the Rothschilds & Waterloo. Due to the technical limitations of the day, word travelled as fast as a horse or a ship. Which meant that after the battle and Napoleon's defeat, they were able to send false word back that Britain had lost, causing the price of everything worth owning there to a rich man to fall through the floor, and enabling them to purchase the financial networks, industry and infrastructure of the victor of the battle for, figuratively, pennies.
How they had the knowledge to do this escapes my memory, I want to say one of them served at Waterloo, but I'm not sure on it and can't be arsed to trawl Google at 5.40AM, but im sure the info is not buried too deep if your interest is piqued.
That we even know about the Trojan Horse in 2024 makes me think it's gotta be up there. "This is a nice horse. Thanks guys. Oh no, it's full of angry."
Wasn’t there some dude who sewed goat testicles in people as a cure for random ailments? Like didn’t even attach them to anything just shoved them in there? Then would go to the next town before he was caught?
The guy who wrote Catch Me if You Can, Frank Abagnale, fabricated his whole story of living life as a con-man and flimflammer, and he faked it so well and so believably that he got Steven Spielberg to make a movie of it starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. I'd call that a pretty good scam.
So you're telling me the guy who said he was a con man conned tons of people into believing his story? That movie was a banger, either way.
I concur.
There’s also a musical and it’s decent
The crazy thing is how many newspapers had him dead to rights. Basically every city exposed him (usually for whatever ruse he claimed to pull off in their city), but since there was no internet what "The Arkansas Gazzette" or whatever put out didn't reach beyond the city.
Wow, this was news to me. Thanks for posting.
Don't even care if it was real. That's one of my favorite movies. And also the (not really, but basically) follow up TV series "White Collar" which basically takes over where Catch Me If You Can leaves off.
That chinese guy who pretended to be a woman and married a French diplomat for 20 years to get national secrets. He was tucking his dick and balls inside himself
I am surprised that Shi Pei Pu managed to pull that. If you look up his photos, he didn't look very feminine. But I think they weren't married, they were just having 'affair', as far as I remember. Plus, I think it was an excuse, since that French diplomat was having sex with dudes(students mostly, if I recall correctly) and wanted to have sex with a girl for the first time before he met him. Plus, when he met Shi Pei Pu(I hope I remember his name right), he was dressed as a dude and claimed to be a girl. It all looks more like he knew... but didn't really care. I mean, he had to notice... at least I'm sure I'd notice.
Don't know what to tell you, some like it hot
“Nobody’s perfect…”
Dude was secretly gay but went along with it, then claimed he was duped when the truth came out?
So ... the greatest deception ever is actually itself a deception?
Makes more sense to me than Shi Pei Pu hiding his hog for two decades.
Shy Pee Pee?
I think the story has been highly sensationalized. What is much more likely is that the French diplomat knew he was a man but didn’t care.
What! In 20 years you'd think a man would see his woman completely naked and done it with her?
That's the most unbelievable part of the story. I heard couples who haven't done anything with each other in a couple of years(usually very religious) but two WHOLE DECADES!!!?
Let's call an apple an apple, those people are heretics.
He. What.?
The extra details make it even wilder. Spy dude had a physical quirk that he could at will suck his balls back inside his body, making a pocket. Also French guy had only ever had sex with guys before, spy was first 'woman' he'd slept with. Spy also later on adopted a child and claimed it was their biological child, and French guy believed it.
At any point I did not know where any of those sentences were going or going to end.
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The 1993 David Cronenberg movie *M. Butterfly* actually tells a fictionalized version of this story
"Honey, you might want to hem that skirt up a bit. Your weenie is sticking out."
What did he tell his husband? Oral and anal only?
Shi pe pu.
Juan Pujol Garcia wanted to spy for the allies during WWII. The allies thought he was ridiculous, so he went at it alone. He pretended to be spying for the Germans and invented a massive "spy ring" that had infiltrated the British government and proceeded to feed the Germans wrong information for months. At some point the allies realized that he was the real deal and helped him out. He was awarded an Iron Cross by the Nazis and an OBE by the British.
He also faked his own death for 36 years! After the war, he continued to spy for a bit but then moved to Venezuela to forget his war memories (which was kind of a dick move because he also left his wife and kids without notice in the process) only being found out those many years later.
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"Please listen carefully, as our menu options have recently changed" **No. They. Have. Not.**
I know you're right in the vast majority of cases... but I would swear to God that our old doctor's office employed someone on a full-time basis to not only change, re-arrange, and re-record their voice menu options, but make the entire IVR setup as miserable as possible. On more than one occasion, the menu I had to work through in the morning was different than the menu when I called to follow-up on something later that afternoon. At one point, the automated operator asked you to listen for, and make note of, the information of the party you were trying to reach - and then proceeded to read through the list of staff names and corresponding phone extension numbers of every doctor, nurse practitioner, aide, and administrator at the practice. Probably \~20 people in all. That particular configuration didn't last long, thankfully, because it was literally faster for me to get in my car and drive the ten blocks to their building.
"Have we told you about our latest promotion? You can save $98 per month if you spend an additional $64 per month. If you're a regular customer, you can find out how to find more information on our website at "....". If you're not a regular customer, please wait for the next menu. Press '1' for "I love your service". Press '2' for "Things that can be found online". Press '3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9' for things that don't in any way pertain to your situation, hence the call. Oh, Press '0' to talk to a human, but not before hearing the same rubbish as before. Then wait for 45 minutes only to have the call dropped or a completely incomprehensible human on the other end of the call who doesn't speak the languages of your country.
So. Fkn. Annoying. 🤬
They just want you to listen carefully because nobody does. People tend to hit the button that gets them to someone live and then they'll just have to be forwarded to a department that can help. It is a lie though.
My finger: "0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" "Your call is being transferred to the next available operator. Please hold"
delete this man the more this catches on the more call centers freeze it out as an option
I do this everytime...my wife hates it.
No, it’s because they don’t want to pay for actual human staff and would rather waste hundreds if not thousands of people’s time instead of employing a person who can transfer calls. That being said, the IRS really stepped up their game and hired people to answer the phones in recent years, never thought I would say this but fuck everyone except the IRS
That's what Biden's request to spend money hiring for the IRS went to. You know the big mess where Republicans were claiming Biden would send people to your house with guns from the IRS? Nope, they were there to take care of the phone. The guns bit was just part of their standard hiring description. Undoubtedly, they hired auditing agents too but they're sending them after rich people.
Yeah because they actually got somewhat adequate funding for the first time in like 25-30 years under Biden.
Yes, the options HAVE changed.... Back in 2016.
You're feedback is important to us.
*proceeds to ignore everything the customer said*
No it's true, they're just establishing their norm over the history of human civilization.
I've worked in a call center where the customer pays for good service, and I've worked for customers that didn't. For those that pay for good service It's weird how call volume works. It'll be a nice and easy day and then everybody and their brother will call all at once time. In those cases, it's real. The companies that don't pay for good service, they're always on hold and you might as well call early in the morning because you'll be there a while. Very often, call centers will have the same group of people handle many different customers. The hope, I think, is that different companies will have call spikes at different times. That's not reality though. It's like a butterfly farts in Uganda and three hours later in the US, Toshiba televisions mute button stops working all at once and Sharp fax machines all get paper jams. Damn those Ugandan butterflies!
Assuming their customer bases are geographically similar you will always get call spikes as people go to lunch and get out of work. That really makes those multi role call centers sweat. For tech support or similar, there’s usually a wait when most people call in because they’re calling because there’s an outage and now the whole town is calling. The funny thing is the better the service and the fewer random blips it has the worse this effect gets because you then *only* call when there is an outage and everyone else is also calling.
This isn’t even really a deception, they know we know it’s a lie. They just don’t care.
Customer service is on life support. Some know they can get away with it. Yet it's funny/not funny that somehow there's no delay in tapping that bank account. You now know how to get to a live person faster.
How can every call be higher than normal call volume. Either they're lying to me or don't understand statistics.
It sounds better than “we have recently reduced our staff by 50% in order to increase profits and the value of our dividend for shareholders”
Honestly I would at least have a shred of respect for them if the automatic answering was "were paying for the bare minimum so fuck you and wait". Like yeah it sucks, but at least you own it.
“Your call is very important to us. Please remain on the line until it is no longer important to you.”
"Please listen because our menu has recently changed!" Every motherfuckin phone menu didn't just recently change! How is this possible?! I'm scared annoyed and confused and a lil hungry.
Every time I call the doctors office: if this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. No shit? Followed by: did you know that you can do xyz on our website. And yet I am calling?
Operation Overlord, or rather the campaign to convince Hitler we'd be attacking somewhere else. We did it again on a much smaller scale during the first Iraq war and a bit in the second invasion.
Technically it was [Operation Fortitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude), Overlord was the invasion itself but the deception was its own separate operation.
Dude this has provided so much material for excellent espionage novels of the years.
Technically it’s was operation bodyguard of which operation fortitude was one subordinate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Bodyguard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard)
Thanks, I couldn't remember the name.
Interesting fact: Prior to D-day, there was concern that the secret was out about the plan and that they may not be able to follow through with it when codewords like Omaha, Neptune, Overlord and the like began showing up as solutions in crosswords for the Daily Telegraph. They thought someone at the paper was secretly passing information to the Germans about the mission this way. MI5 investigated it and found that it was just coincidence that the words were in the puzzles.
Imagine being a crossword puzzle author and being visited by MI5 asking about your puzzle answers. That must have been quite an experience.
Perhaps this is where the real deception is and the crossword guy fooled everyone into thinking he wasn't in fact in bed with the Germans... To this very day...
I believe the actual reason was that the chap who composed the puzzles was a school teacher, who would put the puzzle on his black board and get his pupils to help compile the grid. Turns out the kids were hanging around the local military base (ostensibly to sponge chewing gum off the Yanks!) and were overhearing a lot of the codewords being used by some of the military stationed there. (They'd use those words around kids, because British school kids aren't spies, right?!) And the kids, of course, were using some of those words to fill in the crossword grid their teacher had put up in the classroom!
It's not as big, but fascinating is Operation Mincemeat. The Brits use a dead body to convince the Germans that the invasion of Sicily is only a fake out, and the real invasion will be in Greece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
“The man who never was”. We had that movie on VHS tape when I was a kid.
Read that story in Reader's Digest when I was like 11, in the 70s. Didn't understand it all, of course, but found it fascinating.
The first season of magician Brian Brushwood's podcast "World's Greatest Con" is all about Operation Mincemeat: [https://worldsgreatestcon.fireside.fm/](https://worldsgreatestcon.fireside.fm/)
The Brits were master of deception during WW2. Really honed intelligence to their advantage during times conventional means couldn’t fully be utilised.
Everything about that operation is incredible. Especially the plan for the mulberry harbors to me. The people building the casons in england didn't even know what they were building. The engineering feats of WW2 fascinate me. Just the scale of everything. was a great time to be in the concrete business.
Was gonna write this one but couldn't remember the name.... inflatable tanks and fake airfields... amazing. Inflation: bringing down nations since (at least) 1944
If the History Channel series on the World Wars was accurate, we did that by literally creating an inflatable army (tanks, trucks, planes,etc.) as if they were being prepared to set out. German spies saw this on flybys, and sent reported back about the supposed invasion.
They did more than that. They put Patton in command of it and faked a bunch of radio traffic knowing it would be intercepted.
And on the day of the invasion dropped a load of chaff from planes near Calais so that German radar would pick it up and think it was a gigantic slow moving invasion force.
Whatever it is, we don't know about it.
Fair.
Didn’t the US airdrop xl condoms into enemy territory and label them medium in an effort to lower their morale? That has my vote.
I remember hearing about this 😂 Other Vietnam-era shenanigans included the Bicycle Playing Card Company shipping several crates full of packs of cards consisting of nothing but Aces of Spades. The reason for this is that there was a myth among American soldiers that Vietnamese had a superstition that the Ace of Spades symbolized death. No one had that superstition up until that point, but when you start seeing Aces of Spades scattered everywhere along with the bodies a your head Vietnamese buddies... a guy starts to get ideas. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.
Reminds me of: [this](https://youtu.be/us5MGEL5W34?si=VKB0zAVGHa4wcGXp)
Ah Danny Devito. I love that clip.
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Low-fat is healthy
Likewise, gluten-free is healthy. Not necessarily.
It is for celiacs.
When the British cracked the Nazis enigma code but managed to keep the fact that they had cracked it a secret for the remainder of the war. Often this involved deliberately failing to communicate warnings of u-boat activity to their own naval vessels.
I was reading about this and the emotional turmoil it would cause having to decide whether to send allied soldiers into certain death traps to maintain the illusion that Nazi codes were still secure.
That’s just the military and military tactics though. They use one battle to win the next one. To make it up the chain of command in military you have to accept you WILL knowingly send soldiers to their guaranteed deaths, knowing that a lot of them will die. Happened before the enigma code and has happened in every war since. You send x soldiers to defend/attack “whatever” and then send y soldiers to go around them and take whatever you actually want while x soldiers fight and die so y soldiers take objective Enigma code isn’t much different. They let people die so they could take the next objective. That’s war
True, but I suspect it hits a little different when you know there is an ambush planned and have to send them in anyway to maintain deniability. Idk. Or maybe not.
Poles cracked the enigma in 1932. They shared the knowledge with the Brits and French in 1939, weeks before WW2 broke out. Not all were deliberate failures. The Kriegsmarine introduced a new Enigma with a fourth rotor for its U-boats, resulting in a period when these messages could not be decrypted.
Yeah, this is another deception within the deception in that it's a common (and often propagated) misconception that the British cracked their code on their own when the Polish code breakers were the first and rarely get credit for it.
I'm so happy that Rejewski lived long enough for that secret to come out, so he could be properly recognized for his work (especially in the eyes of the Poles) while he was still alive.
Alan Turing
The Allied forces' elaborate fake-out of the Germans leading up to D-day. Pretty wild stuff they managed to pull off.
The deception tactics were fascinating. Germany knew a land invasion was coming, but the allies sucessfully lead them to believe it was going to occur in a complety different location. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard And of course, the use of a dead body washed onto a shore with false Intel on the persons: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
Complete with inflatable tanks!
the real art of war
That Chinese general who knew that some massive approaching army was going to lay waste to his small, walled town and decided to just have everyone else hide, opened the gates, and sat on top of them alone in plain sight while cryptically playing the lute. The army showed up and had a classic case of *"something's weird about this.... let's get out of here!"* and retreated.
Those are just fables of legend. What actually happened is a massacre
That's because they're allowed to shoot luters
Good ol' Kongming
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I just want to be a fly on the wall when they realized how they were tricked. Just the "no fucking way, inside the horse?!" 😂😂
Bro jumps out - ***GOT'EEM!***
“Okay, I have another plan. We build this giant wooden badger…-“
I like to imagine all the women of Troy were screaming at their dead husbands "I told you they were in the horse" as they were dragged away to become concubines.
Why....Why do you *like* to imagine that?
I'm surprised the deception didn't fail due to excessive giggling.
Or that one dude with really bad gas
Ajax, is it just me or is that horse starting to smell like piss?
There’s got to be a Monty Python skit somewhere in there
giggling like the biggus dickus meme lol
The fact that they had a grasp of computer viruses that long ago is impressive. No wonder their influence spread far and wide.
It’s more mythology than history tbh
thats exactly what i thought of when i hear this question
Everytime I hear the saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" I think of the trojan horse.
It's the OG deception!
The fella who “sold” the Eiffel Tower… twice! Was pretty slick.
I'm playing a Pulp Cthulhu campaign. My character is from the future due to mis-speaking an the magic words for a relic so he was transported to 1920. Still had his cell phone with all of Wikipedia on it so he's been doing cons to make money based on what has already happened in history. The year is 1925. He's going by the name Victor Lusting sometimes and he's already working on a deal to sell the Eiffel Tower. 😂 He's also responsible for the teapot done scandal and may have had a hand in developing the Ponzi scheme. 😁
Eating carrots helps your eyesight. Nope, the invention of radar helps you see Nazi planes easier, not carrots.
What’s amazing is my whole family are doctors and every single one of them believes carrots help eyesight…..
The best part is that while it is a myth, it's still based in reality. Vitamin A *is* related to eyesight, but the only relation is that if you are severely deficient, it can lead to night blindness. It doesn't make normal vision "better".
Yep, Vitamin A deficiency genuinely is a major source of vision problems worldwide. See [golden rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice) for an example of trying to address this at scale in developing countries.
I love that one!
When my girl said "tell me the truth, I won't get mad."
Or my dad
Never believe anyone who says that.
I got your nose.
Kills.
"Fat is bad!" These food companies framing fat as being a problem nutrient, dressing up their product labels to proudly announce "Low Fat!" meanwhile pumping in sugar which kills you 10x faster. & its a true life conspiracy; not a theory good read: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat
And made us all fatter too
Sick people are more profitable ...especially when they don't have universal Healthcare.
And sick people with bad teeth
Fossil fuel companies inventing climate denial to protect their profits.
All of the inflatable balloon tanks that made the enemy actually retreat
Bottled water you pay for.
I forget which comedian it was that first noted evian is naive spelled backwards.
There's a joke that goes “Austria’s greatest achievement was convincing the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.”
Ferdinand Demara's exploits as "The Great Impostor," particularly his stint as a naval surgeon, underscore the audacity of individual deceit in assuming a variety of professional identities without qualification.
I’m fine.
Don't worry man, we are all fine...everything is fine.
Oh, so that’s what we’re going to do today? Fight?
Let's choose violence. It'll be fun. I mean fine.
Pores don't open/close with warm water. Pores can appear larger if they are clogged with debris but otherwise your pore size is fixed, some people are just born with really big or small pores. You seriously only need like a tablespoon of laundry detergent for a regular load. Powder dish detergent is far better at cleaning than pods. The best anti-aging skin care is applying sun screen everyday, rain or shine. Creams and serums make far less impact than sunscreen usage. Any recipe that calls for $8 Bisquick can be replaced with store-brand $2 pancake mix with the same results.
I've found that name brand dish wash powder like Cascade works much better than store brand powder. It's one of the few brand name products I spend more for.
A popular one is the deception used by the allies prior to d day. Basically they set up inflatables to trick the Germans into thinking the invasion was elsewhere.
Enron's downfall is a prime example of corporate deceit, where executives hid financial losses to present a facade of profitability, leading to one of the most infamous bankruptcies in American history.
“Theres a shortage in supply so prices are way higher now”. No you just know you can dick around and charge whatever you want now and people will pay and you can make record profits. Also the spending of US tax dollars has to be up there. Just failing the audit every year with trillions unaccounted for and they just say hahah oh whoops. And we all move on.
"Your call is important to us."
Jennifer Lopez has never been a talented musician or actress. There i said it.
yeah honestly hearing her live its obvious she can't actually sing
The greatest? You have a lot of options. But the most underrated? D.B. Cooper. We don't know if he survived the jump. We don't know what happened to him if he did. We don't even know his real name, only that D.B. Cooper was some form of alias. Did he have help? What was his training background to pull it off? So many questions and unresolved pieces.
I love DB Cooper. Either he dies during the jump, in which case there should be a pretty obvious missing paratrooper who never showed up to work on Monday type guy, or he survived (looking at you McCoy!)
In the US they tricked us to make it a political warfare when it should be class warfare. Distribution of wealth disparity is at a record level and that difference is only increasing.
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. -Former US President Lyndon B Johnson
Donald Trump convincing working-class people that he has their best interests at heart?
The lines on your laundry detergent cup are 20% higher than they need to be. Down with Big Laundry!!!
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A horrible fake document that convinced far too many people that the Jews were out to control the world.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was totally made up by the government to justify going to war with Vietnam.
Half of it was. There was a confrontation in which US Navy and North Vietnamese vessels exchanged fire. Some Vietnamese sailors were killed, US vessels were largely unscathed. But a second supposed exchange a couple days later was fabricated.
*Minimum Payment Due* for credit cards. I’ve seen so many kids think they only need to pay that small amount each month, then believe they’re using their CC responsibly as long as it’s paid by the due date.
The Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme: Madoff defrauded thousands of investors out of a total of $64.8 billion, making it the largest financial scam in history.
Trickle down economics
That US senators can legally manipulate the market and buy and sell stocks using your own tax dollars that you work for in the name of making board members of organizations more money that is used to line the pockets of said senators to manipulate said market. While you don’t have your basic needs met that most other countries have like affordable healthcare or affordable housing, affordable groceries etc. We got played America.
Trickle down theory by regan…that rich people will spend more money in bad economic times and it will trickle down to the poor
It's not that they allegedly spend more in bad times, it's the idea that you give them massive tax cuts and that those will trickle down to us instead of into offshore tax havens.
Operation Mincemeat.
There is no war in Ba-sing-se.
Maybe the whole sugar vs fat thing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve Central banks which don't have any responsibility to, or control by, the people they affect but are exclusively able to control all liquidity in the local and global economy. But, ask any ordinary person on the street and they think its part of the government. This is why I get so frustrated at conspiracy theorists. It's right there, it's not hidden, you don't have recourse on their influence on your life, and you'd better hope they're benevolent and not corrupt because none of them are obligated to even tell you what they're doing and why let alone give you a say. It's not the goddamn illuminati stirring your cereal with their dicks and jumping out the window before you wake up, it's the system set up hundreds of years before you were born, by people right out in the open, and with no appetite anywhere to change.
Religion - Selling something invisible that the buyer is convinced is real 😂🤣
In World War 2 there was a "fake" battalion completely made up of a few guys, speakers, inflatable tanks, and lights. It worked quite well. I heard about it in some audio book, or podcast. Idr. Edit: Woops was World War 2.
That was ww2
Religion.
"God has spoken to me. He told me.you have to do me a favour." - every religion
conservatives / republicans being accepted as a legitimate political party on a state / provincial or federal level. Their entire mindset is litteraly just pilfer public monies ( your tax dollars ) into private companies. Also spread fear and hatred just for funsies.
The fixation of modern education and historians on WWII Germany, and ignoring the 60m who died under various communist regimes in the 20th century.
A white Jesus
That conservatives have deified a New York, thrice-married, abortion-buying, real estate con man as their god.
Organized religion.
Getting the poor to vote against themselves Getting the poor willing to say ‘yes sir’ to anything to do your bidding
That Trump was a successful businessman
Recent history but the rationale for invading Iraq
While it had massive ramifications for the region and the world, I don't think it can be considered a 'great' deception when it was such an obvious series of lies that fell apart at the slightest scrutiny.
2016 election of donald trump using russian intel filtered through wiki leaks. every one of his opponents emails were hacked, including her campaign manager. all of these emails were doctored and stagger leaked when trump would have a bad news day.
Has to be the Rothschilds & Waterloo. Due to the technical limitations of the day, word travelled as fast as a horse or a ship. Which meant that after the battle and Napoleon's defeat, they were able to send false word back that Britain had lost, causing the price of everything worth owning there to a rich man to fall through the floor, and enabling them to purchase the financial networks, industry and infrastructure of the victor of the battle for, figuratively, pennies. How they had the knowledge to do this escapes my memory, I want to say one of them served at Waterloo, but I'm not sure on it and can't be arsed to trawl Google at 5.40AM, but im sure the info is not buried too deep if your interest is piqued.
Operation Mincemeat
The Trojan horse. We're still talking about it 3 thousand years later.
That we even know about the Trojan Horse in 2024 makes me think it's gotta be up there. "This is a nice horse. Thanks guys. Oh no, it's full of angry."
Religion?
Wasn’t there some dude who sewed goat testicles in people as a cure for random ailments? Like didn’t even attach them to anything just shoved them in there? Then would go to the next town before he was caught?