Let’s Read: Cheaters Always Prosper

There are few books more despicable than the one I’m showing you today. I have a wall of books on how to murder men with knives, raise children like Bill Cosby, and electro shock the gay out of your son, but none of them approach the pure piece-of-shittedness of Cheaters Always Prosper – 50 Ways to Beat the System Without Getting Caught.

This is a book for psychopaths stupid enough to need an instruction manual for robbery. James Brazil (not the author’s real name) wrote it in the year 2000 when these low-stakes, obvious grifts were already useless against even the most relaxed store policies. Let’s go through all fifty of these in order:

This dumbshit scheme, along with the rambling, completely fabricated story about getting a milk refund after secretly enjoying cake is James’ first and best idea. This isn’t a book showing readers how to use loopholes to get coupons or government research grants. It is avalanches of stream-of-consciousness text from an idiot who thinks crime is “outsmarting the system.” This moron is spending hours to recoup the cost of one milk. This motherfucker is just adding steps to shoplifting. If you switch the price tags on easily identifiable items and also stash a very strange sack of meat the butcher will remember making for a suspicious dirtbag, I think the store might have a lead suspect in the case of DUMBSHIT, WE JUST WATCHED YOU DO ALL THIS.

If someone is dumb enough to fall for this, you shouldn’t let them handle your food. Anyone fooled by glass in your dessert also believed their meat distributor earlier when he said, “I can get you magical food cream, but I had to transport it at human body temperature, so you’ll need to suck it out of my cock. What? Oh, yeah, it’ll go great on those invisible fish I sold you yesterday.”

This also shows the author’s child-like understanding of how the world works when he suggests a fake blood capsule will help sell the world’s oldest restaurant trick. James Brazil might as well have told the reader, “Here’s a hot tip for saving money at restaurants– before the bill comes, get up and fucking run!” It has all the same ethics, but a higher success rate and less humiliation. The entire goddamn book is dumb lies and crimes like this. When James Brazil figures out you can just stab people and take the things they’re carrying, he’s going to have a hell of a sequel on his hands.

Why not tell the waitress you own the hotel and came to inspect the employee underpants? This is fucking stupid. He’s trailing people as they leave their rooms in order to set up a one-man dinner stealing job? What’s that step for? Is it only so he can say, “I don’t have a room key or ID, and yes, I’m the weird guy waiting outside doors for an hour, but I do know the number of an empty room you can call to prove I’m not there.” It might work! But I do worry many hotels guard themselves against the first trick the world’s dumbest liar would think of after learning you can charge things to rooms. So maybe have a backup plan when they say, “You’ve committed a criminal act for a 2% chance at an appetizer sampler.”

This story didn’t happen, and won’t work, but if it did, you’re investing a day at a car dealership to save $40. In a business sense, you’re hiring yourself as a car dealer fluffer and paying yourself $20 an hour for a very slim chance of driving a car.

Like with all his schemes, James Brazil has some advanced tips in case you run into clever marks. In this case, he mentions how he tried this on a Mercedes dealer who required proof he could afford the car. This didn’t happen, of course, but he lays out a scheme to deposit 75 cents in an ATM, then add five zeroes so it looks like you added $75,000, then go into the bank to clear up the mixup, then keep the receipt. In his wildest fantasies, James Brazil wants you to spend an afternoon wooing a car dealer, go to a second location to perform some light financial fraud, then come back to the car dealer in the hopes of getting a free car to DRIVE TO LUNCH. This shit is like disguising yourself as a nursing home resident for sixty years to get a free wheelchair.

I know you can’t read that, because no one ever should. We’re only at entry number five and James Brazil has already run out of scams and lost his entire mind. This is one for getting free windshield repair. Step one is paying for your windshield repair, and steps two through seventy eight are filling out paperwork to convince your local county they were responsible for the crack in your windshield and they owe you the full cost of the repairs. It’s the same high risk, low reward type of crime as the others, but now there is so, so much paperwork. James Brazil would legally change his name to Nazi Horsefucker for six months just to get a refund on “misprinted” business cards.

This book’s already off the rails. Let’s maybe skim through a bit… Let’s see… fraud, lying, unlikely scam, petty theft, fraud… OH FUCK. OH FUCK.

Jesus Christ, dognapping? His 17th “way to beat the system” is to steal pets and ransom them for $100!? So you steal, what, like eleven dogs a month to make rent and a few more for Internet and utilities? I know you don’t need to worry about food since you know the trick of charging meals to random hotel rooms or pretending to eat glass. Still, people might start to notice after one individual keeps “finding” several dogs a week. This is so beyond the scope of ordinary greed or evil. This might as well say, “A lot of parents will pay anything to get a child back! Simply apply for an ice cream truck license under a false identity you create after killing a man with your complexion and build. If you find a child who hates ice cream, invite them to a zoo given to you after telling the zookeepers you were Montgomery Zoo, inventor of the zoo. Steal towels from the gym to make your own rope to bind them! I’ll take that $100 now, easy mark parents!”

James Brazil is the world’s shittiest make-believe criminal. He goes on to tell the reader how to get free laundry by retrieving quarters with pantyhose. He suggests bringing empty tupperware to all-you-can-eat restaurants and stealing soup. Fucking #21 is using a fake name to hide from Columbia House Records. If you try all these tips, you will have invested 7000 hours into criminal enterprises and walked away with $117, a backpack full of soup, 34 years in prison, and 13 Keith Sweat cassettes.

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