Three guys go to the bar and get £30 worth of drinks. They pay £10 (10*3=30) each and the waitress takes the money. Before she puts it in the till the manager notices the guys and tells her “I know these guys, give them a £5 discount”
On the way to their table the waitress decides to give the guys £3 back and keep £2 as a tip.
The guys take a pound each, so instead of paying £10 each they end up paying £9 each (9*3=27).
And the question is: if they ended up paying £27 and the waitress kept £2 where did the last pound go?
In: 397
Other explanations do a better job than I could, but it’s worth noting that there are a lot of cons that work by a similar principal – the over-simplified version is that if something is worth $5 and you pay for it with a $20, then “find” a 5 to get your $20 back, but the $5 you “find” is in part of the change… there are more steps added in to obfuscate this, but the gist is that so much money goes back and forth and you add and subtract enough that you “magically” end up with more money than you started with.
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