Nathaniel Hawthorne was no stranger to Liverpool's fraudsters. During his employment at the American Consulate, at the corner of Brunswick Street, he daily encountered the worst the town had to offer:

The Liverpool dockland was the ideal place to fleece, deceive and defraud people, a swindler's paradise. The best victims were people new to the area, particularly travellers and migrants, inexperienced in the town's ruthless double-dealing practices and unable to stay around long enough to prosecute. Unwary Yorkshiremen, Manxmen and naive country bumpkins were relentlessly targeted and bamboozled. An Irish migrant warned that ‘if a man had 7 senses, it would take 500 senses largely developed to counteract the sharpers of Liverpool’. Sharpers were essentially swindlers who used playing cards. Another type of trickster was the ‘magsman’, who ran pitch and toss games using ‘mags’ (halfpennies). Eventually both terms were applied to any professional hustlers, particularly those who toured fairgrounds conducting gambling scams and other rip-off schemes.

The scam business was extensive, involving a whole range of deceitful activities, from the simple three-card trick in a public house to more sophisticated insurance frauds.