TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Telegraph Office Scene in the Movie "The Sting"

Re: Telegraph Office Scene in the Movie "The Sting"

Al Gillis (alg@aracnet.com)
Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:57:58 -0800

Hi Lisa...

That was a good movie, wasn't it? And I don't recall a single
instance of the "F" word! But the reason I wrote was to note that the
victum of a scam like this was referred to as the "mark" as I recall.

Thanks for bringing back the memory of this movie!

Al

<hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote in message
news:telecom25.68.6@telecom-digest.org:

> Around 1973 a popular movie, "The Sting" with Robert Redford and Paul
> Newman came out. Redford and Newman were con artists. Part of their
> scheme involved making their target think they had advance horse race
> information from Western Union. That is, someone from a WU office
> would secretly pass along the results of a race upon receipt a few
> minutes before WU relayed the results to local offices.

> To convince their target, the con artists "borrowed" a Western Union
> local office for a few minutes. They pretended to be painters with an
> official work order and marched into the manager's private office
> announcing they had orders to paint and began to set up. The manager
> went out to the front office while they worked. Then one of the
> painters posed as the office manager. The con target was brought in
> through a rear door to meet the fake "manager" so the scheme appeared
> ok. As soon as that was done the painters took off. The real manager
> came back in thoroughly puzzled.

> It was a good movie.

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