Every con uses one of ten moves.
So does every cult. Every algorithm. Every interrogation. Every advertisement. Every coercive relationship.
The premise
One framework. Ten techniques. Every manipulation you will meet.
The same psychological primitives recur across the apparently disparate worlds of fraud, cult recruitment, abusive relationships, advertising, political propaganda, intelligence interrogation, and platform engagement design. The scammer, the cult leader, the influencer, the abuser, the algorithm — they are running the same playbook in different uniforms.
Once you can name the techniques, you start seeing them everywhere. Once you see them, you can interrupt them.
This site is the visual companion to the book Stop Manipulating Me. It exists to show — through small interactive demonstrations and plain-language explanations — what each technique looks like in operation, and what it takes to defend against it.
The ten primitives
Click any technique to see it in action
Manufactured signals of expertise, credentials, or institutional power.
02Compressed decision time. The countdown that resets when you reload.
03The cheap manufacture of the appearance that the right people are already in.
04The unrequested gift that produces the debt you didn't ask to owe.
05Wrapping the appeal in who you believe yourself to be.
06Fear, anger, grief, infatuation — taking the steering wheel before thought arrives.
07Adoration at a speed and intensity you have never experienced.
08Closing the loop, so the operator becomes the only voice you hear.
09Too complicated, too fast, too dense for the slow brain to evaluate.
10Small rewards on an unpredictable schedule. The slot machine. The feed.
The framework
Two brains
You have a fast brain that runs almost everything you do — automatic, emotional, on by default. You have a slow brain that asks is this true, but only when you summon it on purpose.
Almost every technique in this book works by addressing the fast brain and keeping the slow brain out of the room. Almost every defense works by getting the slow brain back online.
The defenses
Seven rules
You will not, in any individual encounter, have time to read the chapter on the technique being used on you. You will not even have time to think the word for it. What you will have is whatever defaults you installed in advance.
Seven rules. Deployable in any encounter, against any technique, on any clock.
The cases
The same moves, in real operations
Madoff, Theranos, NXIVM, Heaven's Gate, Cambridge Analytica, the Tinder Swindler, LuLaRoe, GameStop, the Uber 2022 breach, the AI-enabled grandparent scams of 2024. Different industries, different decades, different surface aesthetics. The same nine or ten moves running underneath.