Quote:
Originally Posted by nickjehz
Why do people still fall for this ****?
Its so obv. for all the reasons Tooth gave.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BoredSocial
People seem to have a really big blindspot around one of the core questions I ask myself whenever anyone makes a business proposition...
Why me?
There is a lot of analysis out there about how scams work. Basically, there are scams targeting all walks of life and different scams take different approaches.
While it should be obvious that a "guaranteed big return from a random person seeking me out" is a scam, it is not so obvious to many people.
This is
particularly the case for successful people. If you have any wealthy/successful friends you've probably watched them being approached by all sorts of people; women, fans, investors, fellow wealthy people, etc. Some of these people are opportunists, some are curious/fanboys, some are potential collaborators. I have some acquaintances like this and I've watched it. Doors really open up for these folks in all sorts of ways simply because people know of them.
As a consequence, a lot of deals and opportunities present themselves on an open platter. One friend is a decently wealthy doctor. He has cut lots of deals with lots of people, mostly on pretty speculative real estate side of things. Some of these deals went sour (mostly because of bad market conditions.) Some of my other acquaintances are pretty damn wealthy and while many of these deals have made them even wealthier, they've also been scammed and taken advantage of plenty over the years. It is far from unusual. The reason why we might find it utterly stupid is because we're not the sort of people who get approached all their lives.
Basically, a good number of these folks (1) find nothing unusual about being approached, (2) have made atypical investments in the past, (3) because they are successful in one field and their investments have worked out they have a false sense of security, and (4) they think they're pretty smart and have good judgement and their record only reinforces that.