The gold trick....

A friend at work once told me about a certain type of con known as the gold trick. It was supposedly a popular con during the 80s and presumably earlier, but this is the first time that I've ever heard about it. It seems so bizarre, but this friend of mine swears it's true, and she even knows of a family that actually fell for it about fifteen years ago or so.

So, what is this gold trick? The story goes something like this (slightly embellished for dramatic effect):

A man is walking around an undeveloped part of the land he owns. Its still full of trees and various animal life. It's practically still as natural as nature intended it to be, with no buildings, no houses, nothing. No manmade structures of any sort. While surveying his property, he thinks he hears someone speaking to him. He looks around, but sees no one. He hears the voice again, clearly, distinctly. Its not like any voice he has heard before. It is so unearthly that he shivers in fear. The voice seems to be coming from beneath the earth.

He asks the voice what it wants from him. The voice tells him that he will give the man gold if he follows his exact instructions. The voice tells the man to sell all of his property, put the proceeds in sack, and to bury the sack of money in the earth in that very place where he stands. In return, the voice promises to transform the money into gold. Transfixed by the strange, eerie, almost hypnotic voice which he believes to be that of a maligno or woodland spirit, the man obliges, driven possibly by a mixture of fear, and perhaps a tinge of greed.

Within a short span of time the man indeed manages to sell all of his property. Following the mysterious voice's instructions to the letter, he places all the proceeds in a sack, a buries it at precisely the exact location he was instructed to. The voice tells him to leave and return the following day, and dig up the sack he buried. The contents will be magically changed to gold.

The man does as he's told. The next day he returns to dig up the sack which he believes to be now full of gold. He digs, but finds nothing. No sack of gold, not even the sack of money he buried the day before. Nothing. He calls out to the voice, but there's no reply. He keeps digging, hoping to find something. He finds nothing but soil.

Anxious, and on the verge of panic, he finally musters up the courage to report the incident to the local authorities, who, as can be expected, found the complaint to be highly irregular. Police investigators examine the site where the man buried the sack of money. While they were unable to retrieve the sack, much less find gold, what they did find is a long length of PVC pipe buried in the ground, with the other end exposed above ground some distance away. It turns out the voice which the man believed to be a maligno was nothing more than a grifter speaking through the the PVC pipe, preying on his gullibility and belief in supernatural creatures.

And the man ends up losing virtually everything.

That's the con, and supposedly there were a lot of people who fell for this trick in the past. It's hard to believe I know, but according to my friend this really happened.

I wonder... Have any of you heard of something like this before?