Chapter 8

Skilled social engineers are adept at developing and exploiting the feelings of guilt. This one seems pretty easy to me. As I stated before, I am a poker player and I rely heavily on the ability to read people. After the read, comes the manipulation, and guilt is one of the most powerful of emotions to exploit. I will give you a lovely everyday kind of example. I was in line at Sam’s, or Santa Sam at my house, buying one box of cold medicine. The woman in front of me had an overflowing cart. When I saw her turn to look in my direction I subtly played with the box, avoiding eye contact. She responded with, ‘honey, is that all you have? Go in front of me.’ I graciously thanked her and saved probably twenty minutes of my valuable time. The time I saved I spent on this book club blob of course. There is a skill associated with the passive aggressive social engineer. They cannot be too obvious. They have to make the victim feel it would be wrong not to help them out.