> 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.
> 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.
> 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...
If the lie is obvious many people will look away out of greed. There's a saying that if you deceive someone then at some level they wanted to be deceived, and while that's pretty self-serving for the criminal there's also a fat grain of truth in it.
> The fault for this lies entirely on the shoulders of the criminal.
Well, technically yes but in reality people are willingly dumb, which rather abets the criminal, no?
>> 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.
While this is true in the general, there is (at least in Australia) a number of crooks I've come across when I was younger and doing things you shouldn't do that were incredibly intelligent; which is why they had others commit crimes for them, and were suitably paranoid. And were rarely caught. I assume that's likely the case in most places around the world.
> 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.
It doesn't reach me personally, but of course con men have charm. It's kind of necessary in that line of work. You can't scam people of billions of dollars without a little bit of "charm".
> So if there was no threat of punishment you would become a murderous, thieving, drug user?
Many years ago I worked in a startup, as it turns out the primary owner of the business is what a typical person would likely consider a con-man. I have a rolodex filled with people who were harmed by this man's lies.
Good luck seeking justice if you don't have a bank-roll to fund a strong lawsuit.
I've long since let it go, but for a solid year or so I was consumed by hatred for this man and very much would've loved to take a tire-iron to this man's knees. Some of the other people hurt are close personal friends, I can say with certainty that I'm not the only one who wanted retribution. These people also have family / relationships, some amount of wealth, opportunity, etc.
As it turns out, the risking non-trivial amounts of time in prison serves a deterrent for certain classes of individual. People with something to lose. That, statistically, it doesn't quite appear to serve the purpose should make you question the circumstances, the incentives at play as relates to the people committing those crimes.
Do be cautions when drawing black-and-white conclusions from statistics.
> 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?
> 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!
> doesn’t that mean “maybe it’s better” if fraudsters accumulate wealth with impunity?
It’s an argument against using public resources to pursue him. The victims could sue him for money damages, and in the process arrange the facts such that a prosecutor can jump off them versus launching an independent probe.
I know, I know a couple of them. I just don't understand them. Why cross that line? Why risk jail, your career, a whole pile of hardship? The real life consequences is what I'm wondering about, it's as if there is some kind of disconnect there between action and subsequent consequences.
If it is only because it is 'unlikely that you're ever going to get caught' then that's a gamblers argument. (I don't understand gamblers either, so that might be an explanation right there.)
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.
Also, disposable income...
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