i have recently been interested watching this series of shows on youtube, they do great jobs of showing how scams work by con artists....

http://www.youtube.com/realhustletv

there are a few good ones there such as wifi scam where they create a fake wifi server at an internet hot spot and steal people credit card details, trick people with 3 card monte, use card skimmers to read cards and pin hole cameras to watch pin.... some great smart tricks they expose here, have a look

I saw this a while ago on another site, one of the members there said the "victims" know exactly what's going on. He knew because he was on the show and it's sort of hard to miss the camera crews wandering around getting people to sign release forms.

(but sucking in unsuspecting suckers isn't the point... the point is to show how these scams work)