"The three men were arrested two weeks ago. One of them claimed he was a magician from another Arab country, and even used a non-Jordanian accent," police spokesman Mohammed Khatib told AFP.
Because everyone knows that magicians have funny accents. Clearly these folks were organized and up on their 1960's occult movie lore. The con artists convinced the victim that he could multiply the money he spent once he had the gold from the magical extraction, and apparently he had a lot of money to spend.
During the past two years, he paid the three more than 1.2 million dollars, "thinking that his money was going to be more than doubled after the alleged gold extraction," according to Khatib.
Of course, once the con artists had enough money they took it and ran - but didn't get very far.
"He complained to police after the suspects, who are currently being prosecuted, disappeared and stopped contacting him."
I suppose the more things change, the more they stay the same. Renaissance Europe was full of would-be alchemists looking for rich patrons whose money they could spend in the fruitless pursuit of gold production, and this is pretty much the same scam. I'll also point out that the boundlessness of human greed is what makes this sort of thing possible. Give me a million dollars in the Middle East and I could live comfortably for a very long time, but some people just aren't satisfied with that and jump at opportunities that from the outside obviously seem too good to be true.
There's no news yet on whether or not the alleged magician in the group had any magical training at all, but I'm guessing that it's doubtful unless of course he was casting glamours to convince victims to fund the group or something like that. Either way, con artists who exploit magick make all of us look bad and maybe some misfortune should be sent his way - that is, misfortune in addition to being stuck in a Jordanian prison for who knows how long.
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