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Scams and confidence tricks are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim is the "mark".
James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author, and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. [1]
A direct continuation to the series' first entry published in 1984 with the title More Self-Working Card Tricks, and an entry on paper magic followed in 1985. The series would return in 1989 with two entries covering handkerchief and coin magic , an entry about rope tricks in 1990, and then conclude in 1995 with Self-Working Close-up Card Magic .
The spiritualist Oliver Lodge who was present in the audience was duped by the trick and claimed that Devant had used psychic powers. In 1936 Devant in his book Secrets of My Magic revealed the trick method he had used. [154] The physicist Kristian Birkeland exposed the fraud of the direct voice medium Etta Wriedt.
How it works in a magic trick: “I might emphasize something like, ‘I want you to take this pen and write your name on the card. Make sure you write in really big letters so everyone can see ...
Fortune telling fraud, also called the bujo or egg curse scam, is a type of confidence trick, based on a claim of secret or occult information. The basic feature of the scam involves diagnosing the victim (the "mark") with some sort of secret problem that only the grifter can detect or diagnose, and then charging the mark for ineffectual ...
Another variant on the "escape gone wrong" illusion ends without the performer re-appearing. Such a trick was performed by Paul Daniels on the Halloween edition of his BBC television show in 1987. He was chained up in an iron maiden type device where a set of spikes were set to close on him after a timer ran out. The broadcast showed the spikes ...
Project Alpha was an effort by magician James Randi to test the quality of scientific rigor of a well-known test of paranormal phenomena.. In the late 1970s, Randi contacted the newly established McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research ("MacLab") with suggestions on how to conduct tests for paranormal phenomena.