Mr. Johnson (con artist): "Now Edith, when you get this money, ... you will have no taxes to pay , OK? The only thing that you are responsible for are the duties, the tariffs and the transfer fees because this was an international contest."

Edith (investigator posing as victim): "Oh, uh, how much do I need to pay?"

Mr. Johnson: "OK ... , it would come out to exactly $6,671."

Edith: "Oh, that's a lot."

Mr. Johnson: "... Keep in mind, Edith, you are receiving $150,000. ... Now, my next question, Edith, is when do you think you might be able to go to the bank ... ?"

When telemarketers and con artists come calling, they are drawing you into an intricate mind game, probing for weaknesses and psychological hot buttons to get at your cash or personal information.

A new consumer guidebook due out later this summer turns the tables on the bad guys, using their own words captured on undercover audiotapes to spotlight the emotional trickery, persuasion and intimidation they use to sell scams to potential victims.

AARP's new "Weapons of Fraud" book will let consumers listen in and read along as con artists try to hook new victims on foreign lotteries, investment scams and other bogus "opportunities."

Doug Shadel, state director for AARP Washington, co-wrote the book after spending the past year helping to analyze hundreds of tapes of telemarketing calls made by undercover investigators posing as victims.

The AARP funded the project. The book and an accompanying CD-ROM of audio clips are scheduled to be available free in early September.

"When these guys call and say, 'Tell me about yourself,' they're casing the joint, finding out what your emotional Achilles' heel is ... so they can go in and take you," Shadel said.

A retired Issaquah couple who lost nearly $10,000 this year in a sweepstakes scam said they feel both burned and sheepish about being taken in. They asked that their names not be used because they haven't told friends or family about their loss.

They were told they had won $250,000. Then it was $500,000. All they needed to do was send a little money to cover the taxes. And the insurance. And the tariffs. And the transfer fees. Soon they were getting up to four calls a day with increasing demands for cash.

They never got a dime back.

"It was really stupid," the man said. "Sometimes you don't think straight."

More than 1.1 million Washington residents feel they have been the victim of a consumer swindle or fraud, according to a 2002 AARP survey.

"We like to think it can happen only to the ... lonely old widow — and that makes the rest of us a lot more vulnerable," said co-author Anthony Pratkanis, a social-psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In 2004, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area ranked No. 9 among the 49 largest metropolitan areas in the nation for fraud-related complaints, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Washington consumers reported losing $7.6 million to fraud last year.

But these figures are almost certainly low. Studies show that many people, perhaps out of embarrassment, don't bother to report consumer fraud.

"Building blocks of scam"

Last year, Shadel, Pratkanis and a team of researchers obtained 645 undercover audiotapes made by investigators nationwide. The investigators were law-enforcement professionals working in 12 states to build criminal cases against telemarketers.

Working with the victims, the investigators transferred their calls to their own phones and answered the line posing as the victim.

Eventually, the team transcribed 320 tapes and painstakingly dissected them, line by line.

What they found were "the building blocks of scam crimes," Shadel said, common psychological triggers that underlie virtually every scam and that Pratkanis refers to as "social-influence tactics."

"Naming it is very important ... so you can identify it as a tactic to influence you and so you can defend yourself against it," Shadel said.

Pratkanis said he was surprised by the sophisticated level of psychological profiling going on in many of the telemarketing calls.

In less than five minutes, a good scam artist can learn intimate details of a victim's life, assets and dreams, and those become part of an arsenal of psychological weapons to be used against the victim.

"Sometimes it's sweet talk, and sometimes it's pure intimidation," Pratkanis said.

In perhaps the most startling tape, the criminal spent 15 minutes bullying and belittling the volunteer investigator, an elderly female fraud victim, when she was reluctant to invest in his scheme.

Finally, he said witheringly: "You'll never, ever be anything. You're going to your grave a loser. A big loser. I think you're terrible."

Consumers will be able to hear this exchange and four other telemarketers squeezing their would-be victims on the CD-ROM. The book provides transcripts of five audiotapes and a key explaining the dozens of techniques used as the scammer tries to push the right psychological buttons.

Playing on dreams

In all, the researchers identified more than 1,100 techniques used by con artists on the tapes to draw in their victims. But several tactics were prominent in virtually every kind of scam.

• Phantom dreams: These are the basis of nearly every scam, according to Shadel — something the victim desperately wants but that is out of reach.

Maybe it's easy money, free travel, providing for family or making a charitable donation to solve a problem.

A sophisticated con asks questions to unearth the victim's fantasy then gets the victim to fixate on that dream and become disconnected from reality and logic, Shadel said.

• Social roles: A con's No. 1 job is getting the victim to trust him or her and pave the way for the bogus deal. Cons use social role-playing — or foist roles upon their victims — to connect with them, Shadel said.

Some may play authority figure — a company vice president, a U.S. marshal — to lend credibility to the scam. Others try friendly persuasion, pretending to have something in common with the victim or offering to cut a special deal.

Others feign dependency on the victim's charitable nature.

One con artist spoke to investigators about his technique after he was caught. He called victims on a cellphone from a cheap motel room and used different names and voices to create the illusion he was from a big company.

He would play the part of a nervous young salesman, a bank official with a British accent and a company photographer with a Southern drawl hoping to take the "winner's" picture.

"I would be talking to a victim on the phone, telling them we needed their money to keep kids off drugs," he told investigators. "What I actually needed their donation for was my drug habit."

• Scarcity and comparison: Cons often feed off a victim's desire to get a good deal — or the fear of losing out on one:

Adrian (con artist): "You are one of only seven to be awarded the privilege to play the lottery at this level, on the Presidential Gold Seal Awards Program."

Chester (investigator posing as victim): "Well, you've gotta like them odds."

Adrian: "Well, you sure do. And I, and I think you're starting to understand how extremely rare it is to reach this level of play."

Others create a false sense of urgency by threatening to take away the deal unless the victim acts quickly.

One criminal, secretly being tape-recorded by the investigator, pretended to tape-record her in turn as she was relinquishing her award, attempting to force her to confront her "loss" of the prize.

These are techniques used by legitimate businesses, too, Shadel notes. Watch the Home Shopping Network, and you'll see comparison (regular price and today's sale price are featured); a ticker showing how many people have purchased the item (something Shadel labels "social proof" of the item's value); and a timer showing how much time there is left to buy (scarcity).

Buyers who call in to chat with the show's hosts about their purchase illustrate friendly persuasion and social consensus.

Some hard to help

Two kinds of victims — Shadel dubs them "near-miss" and "once-bitten" — are likely to benefit most from the new study's findings.

Those who have narrowly avoided being drawn into a fraud — or who have been taken once and vowed never to let it happen again — are most open to AARP's message of consumer education.

But a third group of chronic victims makes up half of fraud victims, and they are harder to reach. They can get caught in a trap of rationalization, he said, trying to prove to themselves, their friends and families that they haven't been scammed.

Sometimes, the victim stops only when there's no money left.

"It's a crime that has embarrassment and shame wrapped around it," Shadel said. "It's not as simple as just hanging up the telephone. If that worked, so would 'Just Say No to Drugs.' "

Investigating and prosecuting telemarketers is difficult, said Erin Leahy, an assistant attorney general in Ohio who provided many of the undercover tapes to Shadel and Pratkanis.

Many work from Canada, where law enforcement has a tough time tracing phone calls, she said. A very small percentage of the tapes used in this project resulted in prosecution or conviction, she said.

For that reason, Shadel said, "there's never been a more important time to arm people with this information so they can protect themselves."

Jolayne Houtz: jhoutz@seattletimes.com; 206-464-3122