The 5 symptoms of the modern con-artists

Con artists like to sell fiction for reality. It was easy to do this back in 1937 when Napoleon Hill told the audience to stare at a banknote if they want to become rich, but not so much today.

Let's start with the two things that make a source reliable: credibility and authenticity.

A person's credibility tells about their experiences. What and how did they do to gain this knowledge, and how many ways did they fail in the past? What were the things that positioned them as a liable source within the community?

Arguably more important is authenticity. This is where one's honest intentions are recognized. Do they really want to help others by solving the problem they talk about? Or it's a temporary phase that helps them attract attention (for different reasons, e.g. audience building, selling a cohort-based course, etc). Are they really after creating relationships and engagement or only after more followers? Don't get me wrong, it's nothing wrong to be after more users or customers. It's the honesty in the story you're selling that counts.

Being in the community for the past 2 years makes it easy for me to spot these people.

These are the 5 characteristics of the modern-day con artists that I identified and want to share with you so that you can recognize them too.

• The Unknowns - They pop out of nowhere. Nobody knows them, yet they are in your DMs, feed, email, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, etc. They are very aggressive in their pursuit of growth in the least organic ways, for all the wrong reasons.

• The Generalists - They are all present yet they do not propose solutions. They engage in broad-reach conversations asking generic questions that attract attention. They train the algo.

• Selling Curation as Experience - They have the skill to create a WoW moment from curated sources and present it as their own experience. They will take a simple process, like writing Twitter threads, and stick buzzwords to it (systems, frameworks, abbreviations).

• Imagination as a gift - they make things up effectively! They come up with frameworks (or whatnot) that no one has heard before and present them in a trustworthy way. The obvious thing you can notice here is that they do not provide any clues on how the advice they give, worked for them or for anyone really. They sell snake oil. Never tried that, and never will do it. They do not speak about experiences they've interacted with. They sell fiction.

• Aggression - they don't like asking them questions from their field, as they often cannot answer and they see that as an attack. They will either ignore you or if you follow up, they become aggressive. You are pushing them to uncharted territory. They care only about their initial goal — selling their fiction. Creating a snake-oil brand that they will, later on, sell to you in a form of a marketing strategy, growth plan, a magic framework that will work for you because it worked for them, etc (100s of examples).

There is one thing that really helps you identify these people.

ASK.
THEM.
QUESTIONS.

They don't like to be challenged. If they try to sell you a customer acquisition framework, ask them how it worked for them in the past. Ask them what they built in the past that taught them when they sell now. And by selling here, I do not mean selling for money only. It could be your follow for their fraudulent knowledge.

Stay aware and honest.