Confidence tricks.

I came across this article in wikipedia about Confidence tricks. I dont know how i ended up on this article.. but it is quite informative and funny too

Confidence tricks are difficult to classify, because they keep changing and often contain elements of more than one type. This list should not be considered complete, but covers the most well-known confidence tricks. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is frequently called a "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim called a "mark".

- From Wikipedia.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks