Spring Street Scam
by David Wolpe (TMF [email protected])
October 29, 1997

It was a warm Spring day, and I was walking my bicycle along Spring Street in New York City, on my way home from a rehearsal.

As I passed a storefront, I noticed a woman who was handing out free passes. "$5 in prizes, inside," she said. I asked her what the catch was. She said there wasn't any catch, that all I had to do was go to the counter of the little jewelry store and redeem the coupon. I was in no particular hurry, so I locked my bike to the nearest pole, grabbed the slip of paper, and went in.

Inside there was a selection of cheap jewelry -- low-priced silver and turquoise trinkets, hoop earrings, incense burners, unprecious stones strung as chokers. "You can either use your coupon right here," said the swarthy man inside, "or you can go to the back, where you'll have a chance to win much bigger prizes." Seeing nothing that caught my eye, I went through a beaded curtain to the back of the store.

There before me was a game. The silver-haired man behind the counter demonstrated it for me. He looked like he might once upon a time have sung a cappella for a doo-wop greaser band in the fifties.

"Look," he said. "You simply roll this ball up this incline, and it falls into little holes. Each of the holes is numbered. The object of the game is to score 100 points. If you go over 100, it doesn't count; you have to score exactly 100. If you do that, you get your choice of either $500 in cash, or any of the expensive prizes you see up on the wall." Sure enough, up on the wall there were TVs, stereo components, leather jackets, watches, and computers. The holes were numbered, but the numbers referred to a chart on the wall, with point values corresponding to each number. If you rolled into hole number 16, for instance, you'd get not 16 points, but the point value corresponding to hole number 16 on that chart. He demonstrated by rolling a ball. He scored a 28, then a 38.

"How many tries do I get?" I asked. He pointed to another sign on the wall: "The only way a player can lose is if he quits the game. You get as many tries as you want."

I handed him my ticket and began to play. Within the first three rolls I was up to 75, it was easy. After the first three, I had to pay for the balls. Each succeeding turn was slightly more expensive; it started out as $1.75 for my next three balls.

I began rolling. And rolling. I got rather quickly up to the high eighties, but the higher I got, the longer it seemed to take, and before I knew it I had taken a number of turns. At this point I went into some kind of a time warp. I had gone through the $80 or so that was in my pocket. My point total was up to something like 95 by then. I was so close. I heard myself saying to the silver-haired fox, "Look, do you mind if I go to my bank machine? Can you hold my score for me if I go to my bank machine and come back?" He went away for a moment, said he had to check with his boss, then came back in and said yes, that would be possible.

I remember that when I was outside, my heart was pounding, my hands were sweating, and I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. I rode straight to that bank machine and took out one hundred (no! two hundred -- "The only way a player can lose is if he quits the game!" -- dollars). There was a feeling of unreality about it all. How could I be doing this? What happened? I was just walking my bike on the sidewalk on my way home, and now the afternoon has suddenly veered off into the twilight zone.

Back in the shop, I resumed my rolling. When I got up to 98, I kept rolling balls that were going over 100, but never hitting it. It was all the more frustrating that I would sometimes roll it into hole number two, but of course that didn't count for two points, it counted for more. I kept thinking: "I'm so close. I've spent so much already -- I can't afford to stop. I'm going to get there. The only way I could lose is if I stop."

By the time I left, I had lost the additional $200. I was in a state of shock. I went home and locked up my bike and waited for my girlfriend. I called the police. I told them what had happened. They said they'd look into it, and I immediately had the feeling that they wouldn't, and that they already knew about it.

In hindsight, I have to confess that there was a certain genius to the way the game was set up. It was so easy to get so close, so fast. It tapered off at just the right rate, and became impossible just when the player was convinced that he could not lose. The sign on the wall was perfectly written, and placed, so that the eyes would light upon it for comfort. It was as though the increments of reward in the game were perfectly calibrated to the psychological and emotional makeup of a human being.

For some months after that, I avoided Spring Street entirely.

[Spring Street isn't the only place you can get scammed. Don't be a fool (lower-case "f") when it comes to investing. Here's how to avoid getting taken by a weasel in a suit.]

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