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Okay, you guys, I have to tell you about the very best thing I found this week, and I'm actually a little bit annoyed that it took me this long to discover it.

In 1591, a Cambridge educated writer named Robert Green published a pamphlet called A Notable Discovery of Cozenage.

Cozenage means trickery.

And what Green did in this pamphlet, and in the five that followed it over the next year,

was exposed in painstaking, gleeful detail exactly how London's professional con artists operated.

He named their roles, described their techniques.

He basically wrote the world's first true crime series,

except he was also personally acquainted with most of the criminals,

which we will absolutely get to.

Today we're spending 24 hours with one of these con artists.

In the language of the day, he is called a coney catcher.

Now, a coney is a rabbit, domesticated, bread for the table, easy prey.

The coney catchers were the gangs of scamsters who preyed on similarly vulnerable

human targets in the streets of London, con artists, if you will, in today's language.

And if you think this sounds quaint and small scale, I want you to hold on to that thought,

because by the end of this episode,

you are going to recognize every single trick that these people used. They have not gone

anywhere. They just traded the streets of Elizabethan London for your email inbox.

...