If performing little psychologically shocking but ultimately harmless tricks was a career I’d be rolling in cash, I once tricked my sister into thinking dairy queen went bankrupt and closed down and was apparently so convincing that 10 years later she tried to argue with me about it while sitting inside a dairy queen
Iirc this was a big reason Bruce McArthur took so long to get caught, he targeted people from Toronto’s gay village. People from the area knew there was a serial killer targeting them, but the police actively denied that there was any reason to believe that until they caught him. They had questioned him 5 years prior in connection to one of his victims after he made a post online saying he had
killed and eaten a man from Toronto’s gay village around the same time a man from Toronto’s gay village went missing, but was let go, and another of his victims was a homeless man who was never reported missing in the first place.