Charlatans by Moises Naim How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses
What's it about?
Charlatans (2025) examines why smart people fall for obvious scams by dissecting the psychological drivers and technological vulnerabilities that make everyone a potential target for exploitation. It explores how digital-age charlatans use the same basic playbook as historical con artists but now operate at a viral, global scale through social media and emerging technologies.
You live in the most educated, connected, and information-rich moment in human history. You can fact-check anything in seconds. You have access to more knowledge than entire civilizations possessed. Yet somehow, this is also the golden age of charlatans.
Ponzi schemes that would have fooled dozens now rob millions. Religious fraudsters build billion-dollar empires from promises of miracle cures. Conspiracy theories that started as internet jokes end with mobs committing insurrection.
The tools that should protect you from deception have instead become weapons in the hands of those who understand a disturbing truth: your brain runs on ancient software, full of bugs that modern predators know exactly how to exploit.
This lesson dives deep into how fraudsters, con men, and snake-oil salesmen hijack human evolution to defraud millions. Because the question is not whether you are vulnerable to charlatans, the question is which vulnerability they’ll target first.
You probably think you would never fall for a scam. Most people believe they are too smart to join a cult, too skeptical to trust a con artist, or too rational to believe in conspiracy theories. Yet intelligent, educated people fall for deception every single day in surprising numbers. The uncomfortable truth is that the human brain comes equipped with ancient software that makes you surprisingly easy to fool.
For instance, herd mentality runs deep in human psychology. For our human ancestors, following the group was a key element of their survival. If everyone else ran from something, you ran too. Those who stopped to think often got eaten. But this same instinct now makes you vulnerable to everything from stock market bubbles to crypto schemes to political movements built on purposeful deception and lies.
And consider what psychologist Peter Wason discovered when he brought university students into his lab at University College London in 1960. He showed them three numbers: 2, 4, 6. These numbers followed a particular rule, he explained, and their job was to figure out what that rule was. They could propose their own three-number sequences and he would tell them whether or not each sequence followed his rule. Once confident, they could guess the rule itself. Think about what you would test first. Most people assume the rule is adding two each time, so they propose sequences like 8, 10, 12 or 14, 16, 18, hunting for confirmation.
This reveals how your brain sabotages itself when seeking truth. Wason's actual rule was devastatingly simple: any ascending numbers. The sequence 1, 2, 3 worked. So did 5, 17, 4,000. But participants rarely tested sequences that might disprove their theory. They wanted ego-boosting yeses, not useful nos. When they got confirmation, they assumed they understood the pattern, never realizing they were only confirming their narrow assumption rather than discovering the broader truth.
This flaw in thinking is called confirmation bias, which philosopher Karl Popper spent his career studying. Popper showed that humans naturally look for evidence that supports what they already believe while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. If you think your lucky numbers win more often, you remember every win and forget every loss. This is why gamblers stay convinced their system works, and why Ponzi scheme victims often invest more money even as warning signs begin to emerge.
The problem gets worse thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect. The less you know about a subject, the more confident you tend to feel about your opinions. People who know the least about economics feel most certain about their financial predictions. Those with minimal medical knowledge become most convinced they understand vaccines. Your incompetence literally hides itself from you.
In 1920, a smooth-talking Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi discovered something remarkable. He realized that if you promise people impossible returns and use new investors' money to pay earlier ones, victims will actually recruit more victims for you. Within six months, Ponzi collected fifteen million dollars, worth about two hundred fifty million today. His name became forever attached to this type of fraud, though he certainly did not invent it.
The Ponzi scheme works because it exploits different mental weaknesses than herd instinct or confirmation bias. It targets your greed, certainly, but also your fear of missing out and your tendency to trust success. When you see others getting paid their promised returns, the scheme seems legitimate.
Those early winners become your unwitting salespeople, bragging about their profits at dinner parties and family gatherings. By the time the mathematics inevitably collapse, the schemer has usually vanished with millions.
Nearly a century after Charles Ponzi's arrest, a young Turkish entrepreneur named Mehmet AydΔ±n proved that the same basic fraud works perfectly in the digital age. In 2016, AydΔ±n launched Γiftlik Bank, which means Farm Bank in Turkish. The app promised users they could buy virtual cattle and earn massive returns from virtual milk and meat production.
It sounds absurd. Who invests real money in cartoon cows on their phone? But AydΔ±n understood something important. Wrap an old scam in new technology, and people attribute it to innovation instead of deception.
Γiftlik Bank offered returns of up to four hundred percent annually. Users could track their virtual livestock through a slick mobile interface that felt like a farming game. The app sent cheerful notifications about your cows producing milk and gaining weight.
Early investors received real money, which they eagerly posted about on social media. Rural Turks, already familiar with livestock investment but struggling with economic uncertainty, saw friends and neighbors apparently getting rich from their phones.
By 2018, over one hundred thirty thousand people had invested. Farmers sold real cattle to buy virtual ones. Retirees emptied their savings accounts. When AydΔ±n fled to Uruguay with over one billion dollars, he left behind a tragic lesson. Technology changes, and promises adapt to local culture, but the psychology of the Ponzi scheme remains identical.
Whether you are buying international postal reply coupons in 1920s Boston, virtual cows in 2016 Turkey, or PlusToken cryptocurrency from 2019 China, the mixture of greed, social proof, and the illusion of innovation overrides rational thought. The Ponzi principle endures because human nature does not update as quickly as our apps.
Kenneth Copeland needs you to understand something about Jesus. According to this Texas televangelist, Christ wants him to own multiple private jets. Not just any jets, but a Gulfstream V worth sixty-five million dollars, because commercial airlines are tubes filled with demons.
When a reporter asked him about this in 2019, Copeland's eyes went wild and he began speaking in tongues on camera. His ministry takes in about three hundred million dollars every year from believers who think donating to Copeland will make God reward them financially.
The prosperity gospel represents a special kind of fraud that weaponizes faith itself. Unlike Ponzi schemers who must at least pretend to offer an investment, religious charlatans claim direct connection to the divine. Send them seed money, they promise, and God will multiply it back to you. Never mind that the only people getting rich are the preachers themselves.
In Brazil, Bishop Edir Macedo has built this formula into an empire worth two billion dollars. His Universal Church of the Kingdom of God operates like a spiritual franchise, with over five thousand temples across Brazil.
Macedo owns the second-largest television network in the country, mansions, jets, and a personal fortune that would make medieval popes jealous. He achieved this by perfecting psychological manipulation dressed as ministry.
This pattern extends far beyond Christianity. In India, Baba Ramdev transformed yoga into a billion-dollar empire by mixing Hindu nationalism with miraculous health claims. Born Ram Kisan Yadav, he built Patanjali Ayurved into one of India's largest consumer goods companies, selling everything from toothpaste to noodles branded with spiritual purity.
His television shows reach millions who believe his breathing exercises can cure homosexuality, cancer, and AIDS. When COVID struck India, Ramdev claimed his Coronil kit could cure the virus in seven days. Even as thousands died gasping for oxygen, he insisted that modern medicine had failed while pranayama breathing techniques would save lives.
Walk into any service that offers miracles for cash and you will witness the same orchestrated performance. Testimony after testimony describing breakthroughs that came after sacrificial donations. The word sacrifice gets used constantly: you must give until it hurts, especially if you can barely afford it. That pain itself proves your faith.
These religious grifters succeed because they exploit hope at its most vulnerable point. When you face impossible circumstances, when traditional institutions have failed you, the promise of divine intervention becomes irresistible. Add the community pressure of a congregation where everyone testifies to miracles, and rational thought disappears. The prosperity gospel turns faith into a cosmic slot machine where the house always wins.
On October 28, 2017, someone calling themselves Q posted a cryptic message on 4chan, an anonymous message board known for pranks and extremism. Hillary Clinton would be arrested in three days, Q claimed. That arrest never happened; neither did any of Q's other specific predictions. Yet within three years, millions of people worldwide believed they were receiving classified intelligence from a high-level government insider fighting a secret war against a global cabal of satanic pedophiles.
QAnon succeeded where thousands of other conspiracy theories failed because it gamified paranoia. Instead of simply declaring hidden truths, Q posted vague clues called drops that followers had to decode. These digital breadcrumbs let believers feel like detectives uncovering secrets rather than passive consumers of someone else's theory. When you spend hours interpreting cryptic messages and finding hidden meanings, you become invested in the story you help create.
The movement mastered something called participatory propaganda. Traditional conspiracy theories tell you what to believe, but QAnon invited you to help build the narrative. Followers created elaborate charts connecting celebrities to pizza restaurants to underground tunnels.
They made videos explaining their discoveries. They recruited family members by saying they were saving children. Each person added their own piece to an ever-expanding puzzle that could never be completed because completion would end the game.
Donald Trump understood how to weaponize this conspiratorial thinking without fully embracing it. He perfected the art of strategic ambiguity, offering just enough validation to keep believers engaged while maintaining deniability. A retweet here, a cryptic phrase there. When asked directly about QAnon, he would say he heard they were against pedophilia, who could argue with that? This dance let him harvest the energy of the movement without taking responsibility for its consequences.
The real innovation was not the content but the delivery system. Social media algorithms love engagement, and nothing generates engagement like outrage and fear. QAnon posts about children in danger got more shares than mundane political news. YouTube recommended increasingly extreme videos to keep people watching. Facebook groups created echo chambers. The platforms made billions while conspiracy theories jumped from screens into the real world.
By January 6, 2021, QAnon believers made up a significant portion of the mob that stormed the US Capitol. Some wore Q shirts. Others carried signs about saving children. They believed they were heroes in a cosmic battle between good and evil. The anonymous posts that started as probable trolling had motivated real people to commit federal crimes.
The QAnon playbook now spreads everywhere. Anti-vaccine movements adopt its child-saving rhetoric. Financial conspiracies use its connect-the-dots methodology. Local school board meetings erupt with accusations of grooming and indoctrination. Once you train people to see hidden enemies everywhere, that pattern becomes impossible to break.
You might wonder what kind of person builds elaborate schemes to steal from thousands of victims. The uncomfortable answer is that successful fraudsters share a specific set of psychological traits that most people lack. Researchers studying convicted con artists have found consistent patterns in their personalities that explain both their abilities and their willingness to destroy lives for profit.
The foundation starts with what psychologists call the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and anti-social personality disorder, once called psychopathy. Narcissism provides the unshakeable confidence that lets a fraudster promise impossible returns with a straight face. Machiavellianism gives them the strategic thinking to build complex schemes and manipulate social dynamics for their own benefit.
But anti-social personality disorder might be the most crucial trait. Not the over-the-top Hollywood version, but the cold, clinical kind that involves missing emotional equipment. Brain scans of psychopaths show reduced activity in areas that process empathy and fear. When Kenneth Copeland takes a widow's last dollar, he doesn’t feel the emotional weight that would stop you from doing the same. The suffering of victims doesn’t register in his brain.
While most narcissists eventually self-destruct, successful fraudsters learn to control their grandiosity. They remain convinced of their superiority while appearing humble or caring when it is useful. Mehmet AydΔ±n knew exactly when to play the innovative entrepreneur, and when to play the pious Muslim helping rural farmers. This flexibility lets them maintain their schemes far longer than simple narcissists could manage.
Charlatans also display unusual cognitive patterns. They score high on tests of creativity and verbal intelligence, but low in long-term planning. This explains why so many eventually get caught. Bernie Madoff ran history's largest Ponzi scheme for decades, then tried to mail millions in jewelry to relatives as investigators closed in. The same impulsiveness that lets him start audacious frauds eventually led to his stupid mistakes.
Perhaps most disturbing is how many psychopaths you unknowingly encounter. With psychopathy affecting about one percent of the general population, that translates to about eighty million psychopaths worldwide. On a platform like Facebook with three billion users, you share digital space with roughly thirty million people who lack empathy. On Instagram, about twenty million.
Before the internet, you might encounter a handful of psychopaths in your lifetime, mostly limited by geography and social circles. Now you can be targeted by thousands. Social media didn’t create more psychopaths, but it gave them global reach.
Understanding this psychology matters because it shifts responsibility where it belongs. You did not fall for a scam because you were stupid or greedy. You fell for it because someone with a fundamentally different brain targeted you using techniques refined over centuries. Recognizing charlatans means watching for patterns of behavior, not assuming you’ll know evil when you see it.
In this lesson to Charlatans by Moises Naim and Quico Toro, you’ve learned that…
Every charlatan, from Charles Ponzi to megachurches to QAnon, follows the same playbook: exploit greed through impossible promises, weaponize faith through false hope, or gamify paranoia through participatory delusion. They succeed because human brains come with ancient software that modern predators have learned to hack. About one percent of people are psychopaths who feel nothing when destroying lives for personal profit. In our digitally connected world, they can reach you from anywhere. Recognizing their patterns and understanding your own psychological blind spots is now essential to navigating a world designed to deceive.
Charlatans (2025) examines why smart people fall for obvious scams by dissecting the psychological drivers and technological vulnerabilities that make everyone a potential target for exploitation. It explores how digital-age charlatans use the same basic playbook as historical con artists but now operate at a viral, global scale through social media and emerging technologies.
You live in the most educated, connected, and information-rich moment in human history. You can fact-check anything in seconds. You have access to more knowledge than entire civilizations possessed. Yet somehow, this is also the golden age of charlatans.
Ponzi schemes that would have fooled dozens now rob millions. Religious fraudsters build billion-dollar empires from promises of miracle cures. Conspiracy theories that started as internet jokes end with mobs committing insurrection.
The tools that should protect you from deception have instead become weapons in the hands of those who understand a disturbing truth: your brain runs on ancient software, full of bugs that modern predators know exactly how to exploit.
This lesson dives deep into how fraudsters, con men, and snake-oil salesmen hijack human evolution to defraud millions. Because the question is not whether you are vulnerable to charlatans, the question is which vulnerability they’ll target first.
You probably think you would never fall for a scam. Most people believe they are too smart to join a cult, too skeptical to trust a con artist, or too rational to believe in conspiracy theories. Yet intelligent, educated people fall for deception every single day in surprising numbers. The uncomfortable truth is that the human brain comes equipped with ancient software that makes you surprisingly easy to fool.
For instance, herd mentality runs deep in human psychology. For our human ancestors, following the group was a key element of their survival. If everyone else ran from something, you ran too. Those who stopped to think often got eaten. But this same instinct now makes you vulnerable to everything from stock market bubbles to crypto schemes to political movements built on purposeful deception and lies.
And consider what psychologist Peter Wason discovered when he brought university students into his lab at University College London in 1960. He showed them three numbers: 2, 4, 6. These numbers followed a particular rule, he explained, and their job was to figure out what that rule was. They could propose their own three-number sequences and he would tell them whether or not each sequence followed his rule. Once confident, they could guess the rule itself. Think about what you would test first. Most people assume the rule is adding two each time, so they propose sequences like 8, 10, 12 or 14, 16, 18, hunting for confirmation.
This reveals how your brain sabotages itself when seeking truth. Wason's actual rule was devastatingly simple: any ascending numbers. The sequence 1, 2, 3 worked. So did 5, 17, 4,000. But participants rarely tested sequences that might disprove their theory. They wanted ego-boosting yeses, not useful nos. When they got confirmation, they assumed they understood the pattern, never realizing they were only confirming their narrow assumption rather than discovering the broader truth.
This flaw in thinking is called confirmation bias, which philosopher Karl Popper spent his career studying. Popper showed that humans naturally look for evidence that supports what they already believe while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. If you think your lucky numbers win more often, you remember every win and forget every loss. This is why gamblers stay convinced their system works, and why Ponzi scheme victims often invest more money even as warning signs begin to emerge.
The problem gets worse thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect. The less you know about a subject, the more confident you tend to feel about your opinions. People who know the least about economics feel most certain about their financial predictions. Those with minimal medical knowledge become most convinced they understand vaccines. Your incompetence literally hides itself from you.
In 1920, a smooth-talking Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi discovered something remarkable. He realized that if you promise people impossible returns and use new investors' money to pay earlier ones, victims will actually recruit more victims for you. Within six months, Ponzi collected fifteen million dollars, worth about two hundred fifty million today. His name became forever attached to this type of fraud, though he certainly did not invent it.
The Ponzi scheme works because it exploits different mental weaknesses than herd instinct or confirmation bias. It targets your greed, certainly, but also your fear of missing out and your tendency to trust success. When you see others getting paid their promised returns, the scheme seems legitimate.
Those early winners become your unwitting salespeople, bragging about their profits at dinner parties and family gatherings. By the time the mathematics inevitably collapse, the schemer has usually vanished with millions.
Nearly a century after Charles Ponzi's arrest, a young Turkish entrepreneur named Mehmet AydΔ±n proved that the same basic fraud works perfectly in the digital age. In 2016, AydΔ±n launched Γiftlik Bank, which means Farm Bank in Turkish. The app promised users they could buy virtual cattle and earn massive returns from virtual milk and meat production.
It sounds absurd. Who invests real money in cartoon cows on their phone? But AydΔ±n understood something important. Wrap an old scam in new technology, and people attribute it to innovation instead of deception.
Γiftlik Bank offered returns of up to four hundred percent annually. Users could track their virtual livestock through a slick mobile interface that felt like a farming game. The app sent cheerful notifications about your cows producing milk and gaining weight.
Early investors received real money, which they eagerly posted about on social media. Rural Turks, already familiar with livestock investment but struggling with economic uncertainty, saw friends and neighbors apparently getting rich from their phones.
By 2018, over one hundred thirty thousand people had invested. Farmers sold real cattle to buy virtual ones. Retirees emptied their savings accounts. When AydΔ±n fled to Uruguay with over one billion dollars, he left behind a tragic lesson. Technology changes, and promises adapt to local culture, but the psychology of the Ponzi scheme remains identical.
Whether you are buying international postal reply coupons in 1920s Boston, virtual cows in 2016 Turkey, or PlusToken cryptocurrency from 2019 China, the mixture of greed, social proof, and the illusion of innovation overrides rational thought. The Ponzi principle endures because human nature does not update as quickly as our apps.
Kenneth Copeland needs you to understand something about Jesus. According to this Texas televangelist, Christ wants him to own multiple private jets. Not just any jets, but a Gulfstream V worth sixty-five million dollars, because commercial airlines are tubes filled with demons.
When a reporter asked him about this in 2019, Copeland's eyes went wild and he began speaking in tongues on camera. His ministry takes in about three hundred million dollars every year from believers who think donating to Copeland will make God reward them financially.
The prosperity gospel represents a special kind of fraud that weaponizes faith itself. Unlike Ponzi schemers who must at least pretend to offer an investment, religious charlatans claim direct connection to the divine. Send them seed money, they promise, and God will multiply it back to you. Never mind that the only people getting rich are the preachers themselves.
In Brazil, Bishop Edir Macedo has built this formula into an empire worth two billion dollars. His Universal Church of the Kingdom of God operates like a spiritual franchise, with over five thousand temples across Brazil.
Macedo owns the second-largest television network in the country, mansions, jets, and a personal fortune that would make medieval popes jealous. He achieved this by perfecting psychological manipulation dressed as ministry.
This pattern extends far beyond Christianity. In India, Baba Ramdev transformed yoga into a billion-dollar empire by mixing Hindu nationalism with miraculous health claims. Born Ram Kisan Yadav, he built Patanjali Ayurved into one of India's largest consumer goods companies, selling everything from toothpaste to noodles branded with spiritual purity.
His television shows reach millions who believe his breathing exercises can cure homosexuality, cancer, and AIDS. When COVID struck India, Ramdev claimed his Coronil kit could cure the virus in seven days. Even as thousands died gasping for oxygen, he insisted that modern medicine had failed while pranayama breathing techniques would save lives.
Walk into any service that offers miracles for cash and you will witness the same orchestrated performance. Testimony after testimony describing breakthroughs that came after sacrificial donations. The word sacrifice gets used constantly: you must give until it hurts, especially if you can barely afford it. That pain itself proves your faith.
These religious grifters succeed because they exploit hope at its most vulnerable point. When you face impossible circumstances, when traditional institutions have failed you, the promise of divine intervention becomes irresistible. Add the community pressure of a congregation where everyone testifies to miracles, and rational thought disappears. The prosperity gospel turns faith into a cosmic slot machine where the house always wins.
On October 28, 2017, someone calling themselves Q posted a cryptic message on 4chan, an anonymous message board known for pranks and extremism. Hillary Clinton would be arrested in three days, Q claimed. That arrest never happened; neither did any of Q's other specific predictions. Yet within three years, millions of people worldwide believed they were receiving classified intelligence from a high-level government insider fighting a secret war against a global cabal of satanic pedophiles.
QAnon succeeded where thousands of other conspiracy theories failed because it gamified paranoia. Instead of simply declaring hidden truths, Q posted vague clues called drops that followers had to decode. These digital breadcrumbs let believers feel like detectives uncovering secrets rather than passive consumers of someone else's theory. When you spend hours interpreting cryptic messages and finding hidden meanings, you become invested in the story you help create.
The movement mastered something called participatory propaganda. Traditional conspiracy theories tell you what to believe, but QAnon invited you to help build the narrative. Followers created elaborate charts connecting celebrities to pizza restaurants to underground tunnels.
They made videos explaining their discoveries. They recruited family members by saying they were saving children. Each person added their own piece to an ever-expanding puzzle that could never be completed because completion would end the game.
Donald Trump understood how to weaponize this conspiratorial thinking without fully embracing it. He perfected the art of strategic ambiguity, offering just enough validation to keep believers engaged while maintaining deniability. A retweet here, a cryptic phrase there. When asked directly about QAnon, he would say he heard they were against pedophilia, who could argue with that? This dance let him harvest the energy of the movement without taking responsibility for its consequences.
The real innovation was not the content but the delivery system. Social media algorithms love engagement, and nothing generates engagement like outrage and fear. QAnon posts about children in danger got more shares than mundane political news. YouTube recommended increasingly extreme videos to keep people watching. Facebook groups created echo chambers. The platforms made billions while conspiracy theories jumped from screens into the real world.
By January 6, 2021, QAnon believers made up a significant portion of the mob that stormed the US Capitol. Some wore Q shirts. Others carried signs about saving children. They believed they were heroes in a cosmic battle between good and evil. The anonymous posts that started as probable trolling had motivated real people to commit federal crimes.
The QAnon playbook now spreads everywhere. Anti-vaccine movements adopt its child-saving rhetoric. Financial conspiracies use its connect-the-dots methodology. Local school board meetings erupt with accusations of grooming and indoctrination. Once you train people to see hidden enemies everywhere, that pattern becomes impossible to break.
You might wonder what kind of person builds elaborate schemes to steal from thousands of victims. The uncomfortable answer is that successful fraudsters share a specific set of psychological traits that most people lack. Researchers studying convicted con artists have found consistent patterns in their personalities that explain both their abilities and their willingness to destroy lives for profit.
The foundation starts with what psychologists call the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and anti-social personality disorder, once called psychopathy. Narcissism provides the unshakeable confidence that lets a fraudster promise impossible returns with a straight face. Machiavellianism gives them the strategic thinking to build complex schemes and manipulate social dynamics for their own benefit.
But anti-social personality disorder might be the most crucial trait. Not the over-the-top Hollywood version, but the cold, clinical kind that involves missing emotional equipment. Brain scans of psychopaths show reduced activity in areas that process empathy and fear. When Kenneth Copeland takes a widow's last dollar, he doesn’t feel the emotional weight that would stop you from doing the same. The suffering of victims doesn’t register in his brain.
While most narcissists eventually self-destruct, successful fraudsters learn to control their grandiosity. They remain convinced of their superiority while appearing humble or caring when it is useful. Mehmet AydΔ±n knew exactly when to play the innovative entrepreneur, and when to play the pious Muslim helping rural farmers. This flexibility lets them maintain their schemes far longer than simple narcissists could manage.
Charlatans also display unusual cognitive patterns. They score high on tests of creativity and verbal intelligence, but low in long-term planning. This explains why so many eventually get caught. Bernie Madoff ran history's largest Ponzi scheme for decades, then tried to mail millions in jewelry to relatives as investigators closed in. The same impulsiveness that lets him start audacious frauds eventually led to his stupid mistakes.
Perhaps most disturbing is how many psychopaths you unknowingly encounter. With psychopathy affecting about one percent of the general population, that translates to about eighty million psychopaths worldwide. On a platform like Facebook with three billion users, you share digital space with roughly thirty million people who lack empathy. On Instagram, about twenty million.
Before the internet, you might encounter a handful of psychopaths in your lifetime, mostly limited by geography and social circles. Now you can be targeted by thousands. Social media didn’t create more psychopaths, but it gave them global reach.
Understanding this psychology matters because it shifts responsibility where it belongs. You did not fall for a scam because you were stupid or greedy. You fell for it because someone with a fundamentally different brain targeted you using techniques refined over centuries. Recognizing charlatans means watching for patterns of behavior, not assuming you’ll know evil when you see it.
In this lesson to Charlatans by Moises Naim and Quico Toro, you’ve learned that…
Every charlatan, from Charles Ponzi to megachurches to QAnon, follows the same playbook: exploit greed through impossible promises, weaponize faith through false hope, or gamify paranoia through participatory delusion. They succeed because human brains come with ancient software that modern predators have learned to hack. About one percent of people are psychopaths who feel nothing when destroying lives for personal profit. In our digitally connected world, they can reach you from anywhere. Recognizing their patterns and understanding your own psychological blind spots is now essential to navigating a world designed to deceive.
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