Authorative Deception

An authoritative deception is a drama that misrepresents material facts explicitly, or by nuance, to elicit confidence in the buyer. Here a con man plays on the emotions of a prospective client representing himself as an authority so much so one might not easily challenge him. For instance, a used car dealer represents a car as good. A naive buyer purchases the car only to find out it had a bad engine. The salesman pleads ignorance to the fact that it was bad, yet the intonations in his sales pitch assured the buyer the car was good because he was an authority on such things. The buyer’s expectation was that the sales person had sufficient experience to know a good car from a bad one. In fact, the seller who was the owner of the dealership was quite aware of what constitutes a good car and what constitutes a bad one since they frequently buy cars from many sources. By virtue of being in the car business, and needing to make wise judgments about the condition of the cars they buy, the car dealer could be considered to have "constructive knowledge" of the condition of the car.
Sometimes the client is a willing fool. What they want is a good story so they can boast. Here the merchant or trades person builds themselves up as the best for miles around. They are the best mechanic in the city, the best dentist around, the best architect and so forth and so on.

• Story telling
• Misrepresentation
• Confidence Game
• Deception
• Constructive Fraud