Welcome to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthan.

Here at Hidden Brain, we are hard at work on new episodes for later the summer and fall.

So this week, we're going to bring you a story from our archives.

It aired first on the public radio show This American Life,

in an episode titled The Heart Once What It Once.

This story is slightly longer than our usual episode, and it's best heard in a single sitting.

So we're going to give it to you without any interruptions.

Okay, this is the tale of a con that unfolded very slowly over two decades.

What fascinates me about the story is that when the con was finally exposed,

many of the victims were heartbroken.

They wanted it to go on.

They wanted to keep believing.

So here's how the con worked.

Guys around the country signed up for a penpal service.

It would put them in touch with women they could be a friend and a car is part of it.

And then they'd start to receive letters.

They come from Hillsdale, Illinois,

some of them are white, pink, green.

Jesse is a sweet, soft-spoken man with thick plastic aviator glasses.

He started receiving the letters in 1985 when he was in his 30s.

Back then, he was overweight.

He'd never had a serious girlfriend, always lived with his parents.

...