The con game has gone on for your so long and much of the attention has been on the political environment lately.

There are also con games in the data center industry.

Curious on how some people can fooled I found this article on the history of con and how it works. The article does a good job of covering the various techniques used by a con person. Reading them will help you spot the con. But as the article points out many times the conned defend the con game and the con person.

Here is a few paragraphs that cover this.

In 1822, a Scottish con man, Gregor MacGregor, convinced countrymen seeking easy wealth and their neighbors’ better lives to buy bonds, land and special privileges, fill two ships and sail to an idyllic country, the Land of Poyais.
MacGregor priced land in Poyais to make it affordable to Scottish tradesmen and unskilled workers who had heard of promising South American investments but lacked the means to take advantage of them. Poyais had a distinctive flag, its own currency and a diplomatic office in London. The only problem was that Poyais did not exist. Most of those who sailed died on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras. Some of the few survivors were so taken in that they refused to accept that Poyais did not actually exist and argued that it was MacGregor who had been defrauded.