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Advanced grifting techniques

Movies & TV Asked by voices on January 3, 2021

Community season 6 episode 9: Grifting 101

Jeff Winger says:

How was grifting class? Did you teach some advanced techniques; only you could understand? The Brown Betty, The Texas Well Baby, The Reverse Jim Gaffigan?

Are these references to real grifts/cons/scams?

What do they entail?

2 Answers

Texas Well Baby may be an attempt to gain charitable donations from a personal tragedy, much as Jessica McClure did after falling down a Texas well as a young child.

According to the Urban Dictionary, the Reverse Jim Gaffigan is the sale of individually wrapped Hot Pockets as a street vendor. Hot pockets are not normally packaged for individual sale.

Brown Betty is a type of cobbler dessert with fruit and sweetened crumbs. It also has a number of progressively more disgusting definitions in the Urban Dictionary. How any of these are connected to a grift or scam, I do not know, though mixing definitions could support User7812's theory that it is a food contamination hoax.

Answered by ruffdove on January 3, 2021

My instinct is that the "Brown Betty" is some kind of Food Contamination Hoax; where you place something unpalatable inside something you've bought in the hopes of getting compensation from the vendor. There have been some notable non-scam instances of this happening.

The "Texas Well Baby" would presumably be based on pretending someone is stuck down a well (the modern variation is that someone is stuck overseas) in order to solicit donations from concerned parties. There are, of course real instances of this occurring.

Answered by user7812 on January 3, 2021

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