When you look at a con artist like Bernie Madoff, whose $65 billion Ponzi scheme makes him the author of the biggest financial fraud in history, it seems clear that his motivation must be money, right?
And yet, money can't be the main motivating factor for all those we think of as con artists.
What about characters like Samantha Azzopardi, an Australian born in 1988 who showed up in Ireland in 2013 and Canada in 2014, both times convincing authorities that she was about 14 years old and had been sexually abused?
Azzopardi's dark and mysterious (but fictional) tale both times triggered police hunts that blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to find out what happened to her — eventually uncovering the fact that she was an Australian in her mid-20s who had more than 40 aliases (Azzopardi has been evaluated and is not mentally ill).
So what is it that drives people to become master manipulators of the people around them?
According to psychologist Maria Konnikova, author of "The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It ... Every Time," it's about power or the thrill of it all.
"Just think about it," she says about the Azzopardi case. "You have got the government of a country looking for who you are, you are the center of a multi-hundred-thousand dollar, multi-hundred-hour police manhunt. And that's all about you."
It's true that for many people who become con artists, there's some financial motivation. After all, you look at fraudsters, three-card Monte hustlers, psychics, and others who use lies and charm to take advantage of the people around them — in most cases, they're profiting financially from what they're doing.
But the "dark triad" of personality traits — Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy — that tends to be common among con artists can serve people who want to make money in non-illegal ways perfectly well too.
"Sure, [these traits] are overrepresented in con artists, but are also found in business schools, lawyers, and politicians," says Konnikova.
In many of those cases, some element of financial motivation is the start of the con artist's journey, but there's something else that keeps them going, that's the real motivation behind what they do.
As Konnikova explains it, these characters need to have both the personality traits that predispose them towards becoming a con artist and then a reason to start deceiving people. But the ones who keep going get some thrill or some enjoyment from that deception.
"I think it's people who got away with it and got off on getting away with it," Konnikova tells Tech Insider.
As an example, she brings up Ferdinand Waldo Demara, known as "The Great Imposter," a character whose story she follows throughout the book.
"His first con was tiny; he conned a chocolate shop in his hometown into giving chocolates to his entire class when he had no money to pay for them," she says. "And that's no big deal, but after that there was no turning back. That's true for a lot of them. I think that even when it's about money, it's not about money. I think that it's more for the thrill and they're addicted to that sense of power, that rush of being able to pull one over on people and get away with it."
