THE VICTIM

Sam, 20, doesn’t love grifters. He especially doesn’t love the man he came to know as John Brown. “If I saw him today, I would either avoid him or attack him,” Sam says. “I like to think I would attack him. The police said avoid him, but this guy has caused me hell, and I’d like to give that back.”

Sam’s problems started last summer. He and his older brother, Kevin, had been hanging out on the porch of Sam’s Roxbury apartment when a stranger approached and introduced himself. “John Brown.”

John What?

“Well,” says Sam, “some people’s names are John Brown.”

To be fair, Sam had no cause for suspicion. John Brown was well turned out: white shirt, white pants, loafers. He was affable and well-spoken. He was also black; Sam and Kevin are white. The specter of racial stereotyping hung over the proceedings. “He asked to use the phone, so I let him,” Sam says. “I would hope that a stranger would do that for me.”

John Brown made his call: “Where are you? I need you to come get me.” As a thank-you, he insisted on buying the guys a case of beer. Before long, they were having a rare old time, drinking and chatting about movies and music. “We were just bullshitting,” says Sam. “We had stuff in common.”

John Brown said he owned a record label, and invited Sam to come down to his studio in Waltham and hang out. “He said he was into hip-hop, and that’s what I’m into,” Sam says. “We were getting along really well. I liked him.”

By the time John Brown said his goodbyes that night, he had stolen Sam’s checkbook and his Social Security number. Within a week or two, he had written more than $3000 worth of bad checks. Sam’s life went haywire. The police suspected that he was involved in the scam. His finances were crippled. Unable to pay his rent, he received an eviction notice.

Even today, months after the fact, Sam suffers from the fallout. “I’m probably going to have to change my Social Security number,” he says. “I don’t know what else he’s doing under my name. I’m still dealing with this.”

THE BIG SWITCH

Can we even call a light-fingered lowlife like John Brown a grifter? According to mythology, scam artists are the mad schemers of the crime world who sell the Brooklyn Bridge to deserving suckers and unload wagonloads of snake oil on the dimwitted denizens of dusty Western towns. Or they are Gypsy mystics pulling bajours, convincing superstitious saps that their money is in need of “cleansing.” Grifters are not thieves. They are creators. They are artists.

It would be a stretch to call John Brown an artist, but he is a flimflam man of sorts. There are set pieces in the con game, techniques the con man uses to soften up his mark, and John Brown employed them to great effect: he used charm; he established rapport (through hip-hop music); he appealed to his victims’ good nature; and he displayed generosity (as Jake says, “Doesn’t matter if you only have $6 in your pocket, you buy the drinks”).

John Brown even had the smarts (and the moxie) to follow up on his scam, calling Sam a few days later to renew his invitation to visit the recording studio. “They do that,” says Blair. “They recontact you to see if the jig is up. If not, it’s over to CompUSA to see about getting a new computer.” John Brown’s may not have been a Yellow Kid–caliber con trick, not a Sting, but it was a con trick all the same.

But then, as Detective Blair puts it, “The con game is changing dramatically.” According to Blair, John Brown–style ID theft currently accounts for about 80 percent of his caseload. “I get so many per day it’s unbelievable,” he says. “It’s a living nightmare for detectives. An identity gets stolen in Boston, it’s used to buy goods in Texas by someone in California. Trying to prosecute is next to impossible.”

But it’s not just the logistical hassles that bother him. Blair has thrived in his job because he enjoys it. ID thefts are threatening to make things a lot less fun.

It must have been difficult to take much joy, for instance, in the case of the administrator at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, who allegedly stole patients’ records, using the information to rack up thousands of dollars in charges. “These poor people are dying,” says Blair, “and now they have me calling them telling them they’re the victim of identity fraud.”

“We used to have pigeon drops,” he adds, regret in his voice. “Now this.”

SCUM ARTISTS

The best con games punish a mark’s greed and vanity; the worst prey on fear, loneliness, religious beliefs, or altruism.

One of Blair’s most painful cases last year — and the most media-saturated — was that of Kristen Clougherty, the South Boston woman who duped an entire neighborhood into believing that she had ovarian cancer. The $50,000 donated by the community didn’t go for radiation treatments — it paid for liposuction and a new car.

Equally crummy was Cheryl Koniewicz, who was arrested earlier this year for writing lonely-hearts letters to more than 100 men, enclosing photos of more attractive women, and promising undying love — oh, and asking for cash, $57,000 in all. And then there was the Plymouth woman who befriended an 80-year-old widow, only to bilk her out of her life savings: over half a million bucks.

There were a number of classic affinity scams in the area last year. Edward Ruff scammed the congregation of the Woburn-based Lord’s Gathering Church out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by posing as a true believer. Glenn Elion, a Cape Cod scientist, took his own family. The affinity scam is a sort of con-trick shortcut, a way to establish instant trust through ethnic, political, or religious identity. It’s a creepy, miserable way to pull a scam.

Just this month, Lewiston, Maine, fell victim to an affinity-scam/pyramid-scheme combo — with grim consequences.

The pyramid scheme is an insidious scam to begin with, pitting friend against friend, co-worker against co-worker, brother against sister. The way it works: you pay a buy-in fee — say, $5000 — to someone already involved in the pyramid, usually someone you know. When that person has found 10 people willing to pay the fee, he or she gets out $45,000 richer. Once in, you need to find 10 people. And each of those 10 people must find 10 people, who must find 10 people, who must find 10 people ...

By the 10th set of investors, you’d need 10 billion people for everyone to be paid off. Invariably, the pyramid collapses, leaving hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people out of luck. (The Albanian pyramid schemes of the mid ’90s affected so many people that they sparked an honest-to-goodness revolution.) The only people to make money on a pyramid are those who got in early — namely, the scam artists who initiated it.

The scheme in Maine — called “Women Helping Women” — was a particularly nasty example. As a local district attorney told the Globe, “Someone they know and trust is telling them, ‘Here’s how you can leave that abusive man in your life. Here’s how you can make that down payment on a house.’”

This sort of thing pisses off Robert Jay Nash no end. “The grifter today has very limited ambition,” he says. “They’re limited in the fortitude of their profession. They have little courage in and of themselves. They are cowards.”

COMPUTER GAMES

Technology has been good to scam artists. It has not, however, been good for the art.

First came the telephone, which increased exponentially the number of potential victims a con artist could reach. The most common phone games — so-called boiler-room scams — essentially involve rooms full of aggressive telemarketers shoving phony investment schemes down people’s throats. The more people you can reach, the less finesse you need.

The telephone did not entirely do away with the quick-thinking, fast-talking aspect of the con game, however. The following phone scam, for instance, is a brilliant trick — not to mention a lucrative one.

A guy calls someone up, claiming to be a stock analyst. “Look, I don’t want any money,” he says. “I just want to demonstrate how good I am at predicting stock prices.” If the mark doesn’t hang up, the guy’s in. “Watch the stock of company X,” he’ll say. “By Friday, the price of that stock will have risen.” Come Friday, the stock has indeed gone up.

The next week, the guy calls again: “On Friday, Y’s stock will have fallen.” Right again. Over the next few weeks, the guy calls back with similar tips, all of them right. By the fourth week, the victims believe they are dealing with a financial wizard — they are primed to invest money with him. How did he do it?

The first week, the guy calls 500 people, telling half of them that a certain stock will rise, and half that it will fall. With 250 of those people, he had it right. The next week he calls those 250 people back, telling half of them that a stock is going to rise, and half that it is going to fall. The next week he calls 125 people, and so on. After a month, the guy’s down to about 60 people, perhaps half of whom are willing to part with $10,000. That’s $300,000 for a month’s work. Ka-ching!

But now we have the Internet, a far less labor-intensive medium. Identity theft, in particular, is thriving online. When his office began keeping track of the crime a few years back, says Hugh Stevenson of the Federal Trade Commission, they received a couple hundred complaints a week. Today, the weekly tally is about 2000. Last year, ID theft made up almost a quarter of all fraud complaints to the FTC.

ID theft is by no means the only Web-driven scam. The age-old Spanish Prisoner con, for instance, has found new life on the Internet. This scam — even the high-tech version — invariably follows a classic model: you are contacted by someone claiming that a rich relative is being held in a foreign country (traditionally Spain). If you help provide a ransom, or funds to bankroll an escape, the prisoner will share his or her massive fortune with you.

These days, for some reason, the scam originates mainly in Nigeria, and the “prisoner” is the bank account of a dead dignitary. The cash you put up is supposed to go toward paying an attorney to thaw the dead guy’s account. There is, of course, no dignitary, no bank account, and no windfall for anyone but the grifter.

Work-at-home scams — “Earn $15,000 a month!” — are particularly well suited to the rapid-fire nature of Web technology, as are classic Ponzi schemes. The Ponzi actually originated in Boston. It is named after Carl Ponzi, a local scam artist who, in the 1920s, conned more than 10,000 people (including members of the Boston Police Department) out of millions of dollars with a fraudulent investment scheme that promised 50 percent profits every 45 days.

The brilliance of the Ponzi, as opposed to other investment scams, is that there are indeed real profits to be made, at least for those who get in early. And the people who get those early returns go around waggling wads of cash, singing the praises of the product or business they were smart enough to invest in. But the Ponzi is actually a variation of the pyramid scheme. There is no product, no business; all profits come from other investors. The Ponzi, like the pyramid, robs Peter to pay Paul — at least until there are no more Peters left to rob. Then the whole thing goes splat.

The Ponzi and the Spanish Prisoner are old-wine-in-new-bottle scams, but there are plenty that have emerged directly from Internet technology. The most prevalent of these is webjacking: you’ll get an email offering “free sexy pics!!!” When you access the site, your modem hangs up and dials a number in Moldavia, resulting in huge bills. Or you’ll just get yanked to one of these sites without any choice in the matter — with similar, costly results. There are many more Internet-based scams — too many, in fact, to list here.

These days, many grifters work exclusively online. According to Jack Christin Jr. of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, Internet scammery has “exploded” in the past few years. “The con artists are using it,” he says, “because it allows them to reach people quickly, cheaply, and with relative anonymity.”

This is a good thing for scam artists, maybe, but not for those of us who delight in their antics. When a grifter can press a button and reach 20,000 potential marks, there’s little need for imagination and wit. This game is all about numbers. It has nothing to do with art.

HOPE

For all its current high-tech gleam, grifting may be the world’s second-oldest profession. There are records of ancient Egyptians pulling the shell game. Sixteenth-century flimflam men roamed Europe with pockets full of loaded dice. The Wild West was crawling with snake-oil salesmen and crooked cardsharps. And 21st-century America is already shaping up to be a very good place for the game. Thank God, because life would be pretty boring without grifters.

Of course, our appetite for the con persists only as long as we don’t fall victim to it. This seems to imply a nation of smug finger-pointers, a cult of schadenfreude. But our love of scammery has its roots in something more humane. It comes from an appreciation of the artist rather than a contempt for the victim.

Con artists are true creators. They are one-person theater troupes: writer, director, set designer, and leading actor. The grifter produces something out of nothing, and that, by any standard, is an admirable thing. But we don’t only admire grifters, we envy them: their flair, their nerve, their ability to reinvent themselves, to reinvent the world. What a kick that must be.

And we love the game because we are Americans. It appeals to our democratic sensibilities — all you need to grift is a good idea and a stout heart. We love the game because it is crime with a dash of enterprise, a comical subversion of the American Dream.

“Everybody’s susceptible to the con,” says Robert Jay Nash. “We are told from childhood onward that this is the Land of Opportunity — seize the day, carpe diem. As Americans, you are entitled to opportunity. You’re also entitled to get taken.”

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.