Scammer Use Many Advanced Techniques

Cold Reading Is A Scam Information Gathering Technique!

Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, mediums, illusionists (readers), and scam artists to imply that the reader knows much more about the person than the reader actually does. The best police detectives also use variations of this when interviewing more difficult suspects.

It also allows a careful observer to learn more about a mark (victim) than the mark shares.

Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, the manner of speech, place of origin, etc.

It also works when chatting with a victim on social media or email!

Cold Readings

Cold readings commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, then emphasizing and reinforcing chance connections and quickly moving on from missed guesses. Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Forer effect and due to confirmation biases among people.

Romance scammers are well-practiced in the art of Cold Reading because getting to your true self is a method of control. The more knowledge they have about you the easier it is to Gaslight and manipulates you!

Understanding the techniques of scamming and manipulation will help you understand how unprepared you were to withstand the scammer’s attack!

Basic Cold Reading Procedure

Before starting the actual reading, the reader will typically try to elicit cooperation from the subject, saying something such as, “I often see images that are a bit unclear and which may sometimes mean more to you than to me; if you help, we can together uncover new things about you.” One of the most crucial elements of a convincing cold reading is a subject eager to make connections or reinterpret vague statements in any way that will help the reader appear to make specific predictions or intuitions. While the reader will do most of the talking, it is the subject who provides the meaning.

After determining that the subject is cooperative, the reader will make a number of probing statements or questions, typically using variations of the methods noted below. The subject will then reveal further information with their replies (whether verbal or non-verbal) and the cold reader can continue from there, pursuing promising lines of inquiry and quickly abandoning or avoiding unproductive ones. In general, while revelations seem to come from the reader, most of the facts and statements come from the subject, which is then refined and restated by the reader so as to reinforce the idea that the reader got something correct.

Subtle cues such as changes in facial expression or body language can indicate whether a particular line of questioning is effective or not. Combining the techniques of cold reading with information obtained covertly (also called “hot reading”) can leave a strong impression that the reader knows or has access to a great deal of information about the subject. Because the majority of time during a reading is spent dwelling on the “hits” the reader obtains, while the time spent recognizing “misses” is minimized, the effect gives an impression that the cold reader knows far more about the subject than an ordinary stranger could.

James Underdown from Center for Inquiry and Independent Investigations Group said, “In the context of a studio audience full of people, cold reading is not very impressive.” Underdown explains cold-reading from a mathematical viewpoint. A typical studio audience consists of approximately 200 people, divided up into three sections. A conservative estimate assumes each person knows 150 people. Underdown says:

This means that when John Edward or James Van Praagh asks the question “Who’s Margaret?” he is hoping there is a Margaret in the 10,000 people in the database of that section. If there is no answer, they open the question up to the whole audience’s database of over 30,000 people! Would it be surprising for there to be a dozen Margarets in such a large sample?

Mentalist Mark Edward relates from personal experience as a “psychic performer” (just substitute the word “scammer”) how powerful a hit can be when someone in a large audience “claims” a phrase such as a “clown in a graveyard” statement. Edward describes a mental image of a clown placing flowers on graves and adds, “Does that mean anything to someone?” whereupon a woman stands up and claims that he is speaking directly to her. She remembers it as Edward specifically stating that she knew a man who dressed as a clown and placed flowers on graves in her hometown. Edward reports that it took some convincing to get her to understand that he was not directly talking to her, but had thrown the statement out to the entire audience of 300 people. She made the connection, and because it seemed so personal and the situation so odd she felt that he was talking to her directly.

Specific Cold Reading Techniques

Shotgunning

“Shotgunning” is a commonly used cold reading technique. This technique is named after the manner in which a shotgun fires a cluster of small projectiles in the hope that one or more of them will strike the target.

The cold reader slowly offers a huge quantity of very general information, often to an entire audience (some of which is very likely to be correct, near correct or at the very least, provocative or evocative to someone present), observes their subjects’ reactions (especially their body language), and then narrows the scope, acknowledging particular people or concepts and refining the original statements according to those reactions to promote an emotional response. A majority of people in a room will, at some point, for example, have lost an older relative or known at least one person with a common name like “Mike” or “John”.

Shotgunning might include a series of vague statements such as:

• “I see a heart problem with a father-figure in your family.”
  A vast variety of medical problems have chest pain as a symptom, and heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. “Father-figure” can refer to somebody’s father, grandfather, uncle, cousin, or any male relative who is also a parent.
• “I see a woman with blackness in the chest, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer…”
  Most people will know a woman who was diagnosed with one of these problems, which are among the leading causes of illness and death.
  “
• I sense an older male figure in your life, who wants you to know while you may have had disagreements in your life, he still loved you.”

Nearly all people will have had such a person in their lives, and nearly all of them will have had a disagreement.

The Forer Effect (Barnum Statements)

The Forer effect relies in part on the eagerness of people to fill in details and make connections between what is said and some aspect of their own lives, often searching their entire life’s history to find some connection, or reinterpreting statements in a number of different possible ways so as to make it apply to themselves.

“Barnum statements”, named after P. T. Barnum, the American showman, are statements that seem personal, yet apply to many people. And while seemingly specific, such statements are often open-ended or give the reader the maximum amount of “wiggle room” in a reading. They are designed to elicit identifying responses from people. The statements can then be developed into longer and more sophisticated paragraphs and seem to reveal great amounts of detail about a person. A talented and charismatic reader can sometimes even bully a subject into admitting a connection, demanding over and over that they acknowledge a particular statement as having some relevance and maintaining that they are just not thinking hard enough, or are repressing some important memory.

Statements of this type might include:

• “I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don’t know very well.”
• “You have a box of old unsorted photographs in your house.”
• “You had an accident when you were a child involving water.”
• “You’re having problems with a friend or relative.”
• “Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen.”

Regarding the last statement, if the subject is old enough, his or her father is quite likely to have died, and this statement would easily apply to a large number of medical conditions.

The list includes:

• heart disease,
• pneumonia,
• diabetes,
• emphysema,
• cirrhosis of the liver,
• renal failure,
• most types of cancer,
• and, for that matter, to any cause of death in which cardiac arrest precedes death or damage to the brainstem responsible for cardiopulmonary function.

Warm Reading

Warm reading is a performance tool used by professional mentalists and psychic scam artists. While hot reading is the use of foreknowledge and cold reading works on reacting to the subject’s responses, warm reading refers to the judicious use of Barnum effect statements.

When these psychological tricks are used properly, the statements give the impression that the mentalist, or psychic scam artist, is intuitively perceptive and psychically gifted. In reality, the statements fit nearly all of humanity, regardless of gender, personal opinions, age, epoch, culture, or nationality.

Michael Shermer gives the example of jewelry worn by those in mourning. Most people in this situation will be wearing or carrying an item of jewelry with some connection to the person they have lost, but if asked directly in the context of a psychic reading whether they have such an item, the client may be shocked and assume that the reader learned the information directly from the deceased loved one. Robert Todd Carroll notes in The Skeptic’s Dictionary that some would consider this to be cold reading.

The Rainbow Ruse

The rainbow ruse is a crafted statement that simultaneously awards the subject a specific personality trait, as well as the opposite of that trait. With such a phrase, a cold reader can “cover all possibilities” and appear to have made an accurate deduction in the mind of the subject, despite the fact that a rainbow ruse statement is vague and contradictory. This technique is used since personality traits are not quantifiable, and also because nearly everybody has experienced both sides of a particular emotion at some time in their lives.

Statements of this type include:

• “Most of the time you are positive and cheerful, but there has been a time in the past when you were very upset.”
• “You are a very kind and considerate person, but when somebody does something to break your trust, you feel deep-seated anger.”
• “I would say that you are mostly shy and quiet, but when the mood strikes you, you can easily become the center of attention.”

A cold reader can choose from a variety of personality traits, think of its opposite, and then bind the two together in a phrase, vaguely linked by factors such as mood, time, or potential.

Summary

The effect of these manipulative techniques is to overwhelm the victim. To quickly induce trust and control. In fact, the application of the Cold Reading techniques leads to an Amygdala Hijack and your loss of control.

The simple rule for fighting these techniques is non-engagement or abstinence. A scammer cannot control who they cannot talk to.

It is as your mother said! “Never Talk To Strangers”

Always remember, anyone can be scammed! The only person that cannot be scammed, is someone who will not talk to a scammer!

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