The Confidence Game: Of Others and of Bernard Madoff

This is the first in a series of five articles focusing on how Bernard Madoff’s confidence game (con game) worked. This paper first examines three con games in order to isolate their common elements. What went on in Madoff’s offices is generally what goes on in most con games: extensive preparations, elaborate props, pretense, victims convinced that they have much to win and little to lose, greed, and the ability to disorient and fool. Little in Madoff’s world was what it seemed to be.