The Seven Techniques of the Pandemic Grift
A framework for spotting the structure when the next one starts.
The Seven Techniques of the Pandemic Grift
A framework for spotting the structure when the next one starts.
In 1902, an American newspaper printed a word for a kind of small-time swindler who worked carnivals, racetracks, and hotel lobbies. The word was “grift.” It described a hustler who lifted small sums from a long succession of marks, never enough from any one of them to make resistance worth the cost. Through the 1930s, when David Maurer wrote the definitive study of these operators, the grift remained a category of petty crime: confidence work performed by individuals on individuals.
The word has outlived the world it described. The hustler at the racetrack is mostly gone. The structure he worked is not. What changed is the scale.
Read the public-health record of the last five years with the structure of a con in mind, and the events stop looking like a sequence of mistakes. They start looking like a sequence of stages: setup, convincer, send, touch, blowoff, fix. No one wrote it down as a script. No one had to. The structure of extraction at scale produces these stages whether the operators recognize what they are doing or not. This essay is about how to recognize the pattern in the public-health context. It draws on the technical literature of confidence work to do so, because that literature is the most honest account anyone has written of how the trick is done.
What a grift actually is
The standard meaning of fraud is a discrete act: someone tells a lie, someone hands over money, and a transaction is consummated. A grift is something different. It is a structure designed to produce a steady transfer of resources from a many to a few, often without any single act that would be recognized as criminal by a court. The grift sets the terms. The marks fall into them.
The most useful starting point for understanding how this works comes from outside the con-artist literature altogether. Gavin de Becker, who has spent his career studying interpersonal predation, makes an observation that travels: charm is not a personality trait. It is, in his words, “almost always a directed instrument which has motive.” When someone is being especially charming to you, the right question is not whether you like them. The right question is what they want.
This is a hard observation to absorb because it cuts against the social grain. Most of us have been taught that responding to charm is good manners. de Becker’s point is that charm in the absence of an established relationship is a tool, and the tool always has a purpose. Watch for the deployment and you start to see the purpose.
The institutional analogue is straightforward. When a large organization is being especially reassuring to you, when its messaging is unusually emotive, when its experts are unusually photogenic, when the call to action is unusually urgent, the right question is not whether you trust the speakers. The right question is what the operation wants, and what it is positioned to gain if you cooperate.
A confidence game at scale requires four conditions. Each was present, in unusual concentration, in the pandemic period.
The first is fear. The fear does not have to be unjustified. In fact, the most durable grifts are the ones in which the underlying risk is real. A real threat is what makes the mark willing to suspend the ordinary checks he would apply to a stranger asking for his money or his liberties. The grift does not need to invent the fear. It only needs to amplify it, sustain it, and direct it toward the operation’s preferred response.
The second is urgency. Time pressure is the standard tool of the confidence operator because it disables the ordinary process of comparison and verification. A mark who is told he has weeks to decide will check his references. A mark who is told he has hours will not. The pandemic produced a sustained condition of artificial urgency, in which “we have to act now” was invoked to compress what would normally have been multi-year regulatory and political deliberations into days and weeks.
The third is information asymmetry. The mark has to believe that the operator knows something he does not. In an infectious-disease outbreak, this condition arrives naturally: the public genuinely does not know what is in the air, and the institutions claiming to know are the institutions on which the public must rely. The asymmetry is real. What the grift requires is that the asymmetry be preserved against any voice that would close it. Dissenting experts who could give the public a second opinion are precisely the threat the operation must neutralize.
The fourth is concentrated spending. The grift is not interesting to its operators unless the prize is large and goes to a few hands. The pandemic response produced one of the largest mobilizations of public money in the history of the developed world, and the disbursement was structured around a small number of well-positioned recipients. The setup was almost ideal for what followed.
Put the four conditions together and the rest becomes legible. Each technique catalogued in the next section operates on one or more of these conditions. The grift is not a single move; it is a system of moves that together produce the transfer.
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