Writer Quentin Fottrell revealed recently that he had fallen victim to a confidence trickster’s ruse in Dublin city centre. “A friendly face caught my attention, waving from across the street,” he recalled. He was duped into giving “40 quid to a total stranger”.
Since Fottrell’s story was published in December, others have admitted to falling for similar scams. In November 2023, Donal Cronin of Carr Communications says he was approached by a man he thinks was the same person Fottrell encountered while walking past the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.
“I had met some friends in town, it was probably about eight o’clock I think on a Sunday evening,” recalls Cronin. “I had decided to walk from the city centre to the Dart station down in Lansdowne Road. A quite well-dressed man leaned out as I was walking past, just stuck his face out a bit and said, ‘You were going to walk past me’.”
Cronin, who lives in Dublin but comes from Kerry originally, explains: “When I go back [to Kerry], when I’m having a pint with my brother who also lives in Dublin, I do find myself all of time asking, ‘Who’s that who was just talking to us’. Because I don’t recognise some of the people either we went to school with or he remembers who we used to know socially.”
So it felt natural to Cronin that he might not recognise the man at first: “I had this moment of, is this someone from Kerry or is this one of my clients?”
Cronin told him: “If my brother Frank was with me, he’d be much better. He’s great at remembering people.”
“And he said, ‘How is Frank by the way? … Is he still in Dublin?’. I said, ‘Oh yeah, he’s always been in Dublin’, and he said, ‘I thought he was away’. I said, ‘No, it’s my other brother who is away’, and you can see how quite literally I am writing his storyline for him.”
At one point the man took “probably the greatest risk in his conversation and said I’m one of the Kellys”.
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“I said, ‘God, you don’t look like one of the Kellys’,” says Cronin, to which he says the man responded, ”Ah yeah that would be the treatment … I’ve been undergoing treatment for cancer so I’ve lost a good bit of weight.”
Cronin asked to take a photo of the man to send to his brother. “At this point he did an unusual thing … he said, ‘Oh let me straighten myself out’”, and proceeded to apparently disguise himself with a beanie hat and a pair of glasses.
The pair started walking together, with the stranger saying he was going to St Vincent’s hospital, but had left his phone and bank card behind.
“I had nothing to give him. He made the suggestion that maybe a pub would give you some money from your card.” Cronin obligingly went into a bar where he got €30 in cash and handed it to the man who had declined his offer of an online taxi booking.
“By the time I was halfway down the street, I already realised – you’ve just been had!”
And by the time his brother responded “about two hours later with ‘Who’s that, never seen him before …”, Cronin already “knew I’d been gulled”.
Another writer, John P O’Sullivan, also says he encountered the man he believes was Fottrell’s “smiling stranger” in Heuston Station on August 8th, 2024, at about midday.
Like Cronin, O’Sullivan asked for photo, to which the scammer agreed after once again donning his hat and glasses.
“I was an ideal victim. I suffer from a thing called, my wife laughs when I say this, prosopagnosia. It’s an inability to recognise faces and it’s an actual condition, believe it or not,” says O’Sullivan.
The man introduced himself as O’Sullivan’s electrician. “Immediately I was like, oh yeah, that’s one of the guys that came out to one of my manifold problems” over the years, he says.
Describing the scammer as “well-dressed and well turned out”, O’Sullivan says the man claimed to be visiting his wife in hospital, but was in trouble because he’d left his wallet at home. Pulling out his own wallet, O’Sullivan offered him €20. “I’d a bunch of 50s exposed,” O’Sullivan recalls, and “he loomed over me and said, ‘Could you make it 50?′”
Similarly to Cronin, it wasn’t long after obliging that O’Sullivan realised he had fallen victim to a confidence trickster. “The minute I sat down on the train, I knew I’d been scammed.”
Meanwhile, “It was summer 2023 on O’Connell Street when I was approached in the semi-distance by this approximately 40-year-old man,” recalls Seamus Hanney, a retired mental health nurse who was duped by a person he believes to be the same man. “When I think back on it, his calm demeanour and quiet-spoken way drew me in and I was desperately trying to remember where I met him before.
“I talk easily to people and was trying to help him, because he was putting pressure by looking at me and saying, ‘ah you have to remember’, or at least words to that effect, making me talk more and in the process giving him vital clues to execute the scam.”
Hanney’s experience followed a similar pattern to the rest, as the scammer posed as an electrician who had to get to a hospital appointment the next day.
“I live in Drumcondra but we have an inherited family cottage in Co Sligo, that’s where he said he did work for us … He was going for some procedure, I think in the Bon Secours the next morning and had left his cards at home.”
Feeling pity for the stranger who said he was “stuck for money to pay the guest house”, Hanney handed over €50 in cash.
“He divested me of €50 and strangely, as I opened my wallet, he said ‘I suppose I couldn’t use the sterling’. I had taken out £50 to give to my son who was home from Manchester and going back maybe the next day. Anyway he then spent time asking me how he could repay the money, he could meet me or ‘drop it off up the lane to the cottage’.
“It wasn’t until I found empty post boxes there that I realised the scam and how foolish I was, because of course every cottage in the country has a lane leading up to it.
“I think I must have helped him out initially by telling him where I grew up,” reflects Hanney, “because he said something like he grew up a few miles from there and when I mentioned the cottage he said he was related to garage people in Sligo”.
“The good side of all this is that the family got a good few laughs about it all over Christmas, at my expense ,” Hanney adds.
Psychotherapist Cara Byrne explains how easy it can be for intelligent people to be taken in by confidence tricksters.
“A lot of it is quite cultural, in Ireland we hate the idea of being rude. So if somebody is saying that they know you, instantly we’re on the back foot thinking I should know who this person is,” she says.
“It’s a very Irish thing to not want to be seen as rude, or forgetful or anything like that, so I think if people are trying to avoid it, the main thing is to really look for specifics. If somebody’s lying, generally they’ll either have a lack of detail of the story or they’ll have an overly complex explanation.”
Byrne suggests one example of such a question that could throw the scammer off: “If they’re saying, ‘Oh, I was in your house’, you could ask something like, ‘Is that when I had the purple door?’ – when you’ve never had a purple door.
“We have to be really careful about being nice to our own detriment,” she warns, suggesting that “being very clear and honest and saying, ‘Sorry, I don’t actually remember you’, and excusing yourself from that space” is the best approach.
“Stop being concerned so much about what other people’s feelings are, and if in doubt just ask for clarification and be very specific.”
Asked whether men might be more susceptible to these kind of scams, Byrne says this is likely. “I think women are more detail-oriented in terms of their memories. We tend to pay more attention to somebody’s name to people’s families, to what was done in the house, to who was in the house.
“Men also would be very, very conscious at the shame another man might feel at not being able to fund themselves … If they are talking to another man who could be them and they’re seeing them in a position of vulnerability, that’s really uncomfortable for men, more so than it is for women,” she adds.
Byrne says this empathy is natural. “They may, even if they don’t fully trust them, think, ‘I would rather pay this than them be in a position where I’m looking at a man like myself be vulnerable’.”
