It's bad form to mock the mark.
— A Spy
It only took Abbie a few days to set up her first Bitcoin-meetup event. It was a Tech Trivia night at a bar in the burbs called The Sly. Half of her trivia questions were about Bitcoin tech, and the other half were about what she thought was tech music.
Tech music? Hell no, it was techno. The whole thing made no sense, but she reeled in sixteen marks, and they had a great time, so it was fine.
You probably think I chose The Sly because of the name, but I didn't. That was just a fun coincidence. I picked it because it's in a tricky part of Tinley Park where parking is shitty. The point of the event was to run a shady valet service, so marks would hand over their keys. The scam only worked if marks used it.
Beanie vouched for Owen and Yaz, so I hired them to run the valet. Each time they parked a car, they wrote down the license plate and brought the mark's keys to a van where I was making copies with my Speedex. The final piece of the puzzle was Foke. He had a guy who could look up license plates, to get names and addresses.
The entire operation was seamless, though I did almost have a meltdown when I noticed Owen was logging everything in a notepad.
I screamed, "Owen!!! Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?!?"
"What?"
"You never saw The Wire? The TV show on HBO? Does the name Stringer Bell ring a bell? You can't be documenting this shit!"
"Shay, you're doing valet parking without a parking lot. The cars have to go somewhere. And we need to return them when the owners come back. Right?"
"I figured you'd figure it out."
"Wow."
"What?!"
"That was your plan?"
"Goddamn! That's why I got you!!!"
"Well, it's handled, but it's complicated. I got cars shuffled across four lots."
"Shuffled? What the fuck? Are you scattering them?"
The words hadn't even finished coming out of my mouth before I realized, of course he was scattering them.
"Can't have a pattern, Shay. Somebody might notice. I'm writing it down because we have to keep track. I'd do it all in my head, but Yaz needs to know where the cars are too. Don't worry. I'll shred the notes when we're done."
"You'll burn them!!!"
"I'll eat them if it makes you happy. No, really. Bring sauce."
"I WILL!!!"
"WHATEVER!"
When I was done copying all of those goddamn keys, I headed inside to hang out at the bar and spy on the event. And have a few drinks.
Abbie's tech-trivia was a smashing success, mostly because most of the marks were smashed. Every now and then, I'd hear one of them brag. My favorite was the guy who announced that, thanks to the signing bonus he got at his new job, he finally owned 1.0 BTC.
He said, "Hey, I became a whole-coiner today!" And everybody cheered as they yelled, "Scott!!!"
Then they all did shots with Scott, who would soon get got because 1 Bitcoin was worth almost $30,000 at the time. That made Scott a smokin' hot priority.
Actually, that bro was a fugly schmo, but it's bad form to mock the mark, so... I won't.