X Marks The Con

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"

A gullible gentleman in Fort Myers got conned out of $15 grand by his compadres in a buried treasure version of the classic pigeon drop confidence game:

Vazquez's story began May 9, he said, when a man came to his business at 2081 Alica St., Fort Myers. He identified himself as Mario Parra, a government worker gathering soil samples along Fowler Street and connecting roads.

Vazquez, a native of Mexico, allowed it and chatted casually in Spanish with the man who said he was from Venezuela.

"He was very nice," Vazquez said.

The next day, the man returned with a metal detector and shovels. He said he found gold or silver in the soil and wanted to dig for it. He introduced another man as his brother, Armando Parra.

The two men chose a spot behind his business, broke through a layer of asphalt and dug for three days. Eventually, his curiosity overcame his doubts. Vazquez decided to help dig and soon they unearthed what police described as a clay capsule with a leather scroll inside.

Parra told Vazquez the writing on the scroll was from a Spanish Roman Catholic priest named Federico Guzman, who lived in the 1800s. Vazquez, who is Christian but not Catholic, believed him.

"It was a piece of old leather. Everything looked so real. I thought it was true, everything," said Vazquez, who has lived in Fort Myers for three years.

He read for himself the scroll's revelation in Spanish of a buried treasure on the site. To recover it, the scroll instructed the diggers to wrap $68,000 and a Spanish Roman Catholic Bible in cloth, place it on an altar and pray for nine days. Then, resume digging.

Vazquez, who said he rarely attends church but prays daily, put $15,000 in a toolbox. The other two men showed Vazquez money, wrapped it in the cloth and put it in the box. They told Vazquez to keep the box safe while they went looking for a Bible. They promised to return soon to pray.

Vazquez waited six hours before looking in the toolbox.

He found three stacks of newspaper cut to the size of dollar bills. The money was gone.

Of course it was.

This website is a good source of info on all manner of cons, including the classic ones.

After a decade of silly internet e-mail scams, it's refreshing to see you can still draw a mark in with a good old-fashioned leather scroll.