> My father told me that con men preferred to go after smart people
This doesn't make a lot of sense. Most cons like the various Nigerian money scams and pyramid scams are designed to only get responses from less intelligent people.
> My father told me that con men preferred to go after smart people, like doctors. The reason is that smart people thought they were too smart to get conned, and hence were more gullible.
Another reason for going after high-status professionals (proxy for 'smart') is that they may be less likely to use violence as a method for dispute resolution?
Also, if they have to maintain a reputation of savviness, they may be less encline to make it public knowledge that they got swindled by pressing charges.
> I mean look at those nigerian scams, they nab people every day and they are the worst in terms of efficacy.
That seems like a bad example to support your point. Nigerian scammers don't strike at random like lightning. If you aren't really stupid or really greedy, there is zero chance that you'll get scammed by those guys. They target people with poor cognitive abilities and people who are greedy enough to think they can scam the scammers.
They run dragnets looking for the rare individuals who vulnerable to their scheme. They are powerless if tasked to target a specific person unless that specific person by chance happens to be the sort of person their scheme works on.
> my parents would also do the same for me/ and everyone's would
Mine wouldn't? That's an obvious phone scam, they would call me directly before wiring $500 to some unproven weirdo over the phone.
> how the fuck we are support to assume people won't give emotional response?
For the same reason you assume people won't immediately become greedy when a Nigerian Prince emails them about an excellent opportunity to earn a few million dollars. Common sense has to play a part or else you're going to be manipulated with or without AI.
"My concern is less about the intelligence of the author."
<facetious>
He was, after all, playing chess on his PC when the scam e-mail arrived. Chess implies intelligence, right?
</facetious>
I agree with you, except I think it's relevant to point out that is naivete in the extreme for anyone to be persuaded by a "Nigerian Prince" e-mail...even in 2003. Would he have been just as gullible had the scammers used postal mail?
> he probably threw that in just to make you think there's an option besides the police
That's what I thought, too. For some reason, scammers often have high social intelligence. Maybe it's like with any other domain: if you understand how computers work, you are compelled to use computers a lot. If you understand how people work, you must be compelled to use people?
> Nobody wants to go up against a very charismatic phony in what will almost certainly turn into a battle of wits instead of a battle of facts
I’ve met some incredibly unlikeable fraudsters. The bottom line is pursuing them would mean giving up months of my life in a tedious process. In many cases, the fraud seems stupid enough that it’s not okay, but just not worth sacrificing life time over.
>I don't think a proper con-man would go to the trouble of actually launching rockets/building cars/digging tunnels though...
Why do you think that? Wouldn't it just give away the fact that he is a fraud? A smart conman will be able to run the con as long as possible with as many victims as possible...
>You can argue whether or not he is conning people but to me it seems that even if that were true it's not on purpose.
May be he is a natural then. I mean, he is as stupid as the people he ends up fooling. I really think that might be the case here. So in that case he is not smart. He is just dumb is a way that is just in tune with a lot of dumb people out there, who then buy into his "vision" and invest in him, because their understanding of the problems are as shallow as the perp who is proposing the solutions...
> They are smart people but they still fell for it.
If they fell for that then they're not very smart.
Would a smart person fall for it if a random hobo turned up at their door and claimed to be Jesus, but BTW he really needs you card and pin for 20 minutes, oh and $500 in cash as well!
> I don't understand how people keep falling for this.
Every successful fraud has people it's tuned for. For example, consider how terribly written most spam is. That selects for people who are not fussy about writing. Conversely, a lot of the people doing high-end financial fraud is done by people who are very polished, very good at presenting the impression of success. Or some years back I knew of a US gang running the Pigeon Drop [1] on young East Asian women in a way that was tuned to take advantage of how they are often raised.
Telsa's only has ~3% of the US car market, so they're definitely in the "fool some of the people all of the time" bucket. Musk's fan base seems to be early adopters and starry-eyed techno-utopians [2]. He's not selling transportation. He's selling a dream. They don't care that experts can spot him as a liar [3] because listening to experts would, like, totally harsh their mellow.
Although it's much closer to legal fraud, I don't think that's otherwise hugely different than how many cars are marketed. E.g., all of the people who are buying associations of wealth when they sign up for a BMW they can't afford. Or the ocean of people buying rugged, cowboy-associated vehicles that never use them for anything more challenging than suburban cul de sacs.
>> Do you have any insights on why grifting schemes appear to be proliferating?
Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We’re in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can’t be real.
> Second - if am being asked to transfer money by say my fake relative I would surely do some verbal grilling first.
Sadly, you are only one person on a planet of more than 7 billion.
I worked with someone whose mother had been scammed multiple times by folks claiming to be his (deadbeat) brother. Social engineering works, especially as the attacks get more sophisticated.
> The women are idiots for trusting anything told to them in this context by complete strangers motivated only by money.
The vast majority of business decisions are between strangers motivated by money. We have a justice system to prevent fraud just like this. You seem to have a very simplistic view of society.
>As I get older, I do not understand how known scammers, especially the ones that raise millions over and over, get support time and time again.
Con artists are good at what they do. People are a thousand times easier to hack than a database server. And there's no security patches for human emotion; we are full of 10,000 year old zero days.
This doesn't make a lot of sense. Most cons like the various Nigerian money scams and pyramid scams are designed to only get responses from less intelligent people.
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