Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
The profiles of scam victims aren’t always what you expect. A lot of otherwise successful people reached their positions through networking, trust, and risky bets that advanced their careers.
A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level. The difference is that successful operators in this space will only place calculated bets and will rapidly update their level of trust when someone fails to follow through. This person apparently didn’t learn that lesson.
There is also a tendency to keep digging once a victim is deep in the hole. They know their job is already lost if they stop now, but just maybe there’s a chance that a little more digging will reveal a turnaround that covers up their past mistake. Scammers exploit this to encourage incrementally more digging into an already deep hole.
> networking
reminds me of a time I went to an event on meetup, I think I made a new friend so we meet up later together at a coffee shop he starts asking me what I know about marketing... I'm like no way... is this (makes a pyramid shape with my hands) guy stops talking
Was the guy named Michael Scott? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC5lsemxaJo
Why I've not been scammed. Why I'm not successful.
But seriously though. Compounding variance is a crazy upshot if you're lucky.
A good saying I heard a while ago was “you don’t get scammed because you’re stupid, you get scammed because you’re human”.
These scammers aren’t random individuals, they’re business that invest a lot of time and energy into working out how to scam people. They’re professionals targeting amateurs.
Yeah, not that I think I'm all that exceptional, but I've realized that truly astronomically successful people are separated from me as much by risk tolerance and a frankly short-sighted-seeming commitment to a single goal as by talent or skill. Survivorship bias sometimes makes me wish I was willing to risk it all on a bad bet too, but a sober look at the typical result of that approach makes me glad I'm not.
Charles Lindbergh was good enough- and lucky enough- to be the first person to fly New York to Paris and became the most famous man in the world when he won the Orteig Prize. Six other people weren't quite good or lucky enough, and died pursuing the Ortieg Prize. If you look it up on Wikipedia you can find their names, but I can only name one of them off the top of my head (Charles Nungasser was a famous French WWI ace), and I suspect that one makes me better than 99% of the people alive today at remembering these men.
Everyone would like to be Charles Lindbergh, but far more common to be Charles Clavier or Noel Davis, failing, dying, and forgotten.
More importantly, for every Charles Lindbergh, there are a hundred to a million people with just as much skill, talent, charisma, whatever, who just had slightly worse luck in some aspect.
For that reason, we shouldn't over-index our society around the Charles Lindberghs.
Bonus points: You are less likely to empower literal nazis.
>A lot of businesses operate on trust networks at some level.
100% this. No one is immune. Not even "savvy tech people;" Theranos and FTX were similar affinity frauds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud) commited against Silicon Valley old-money and VC circles, respectively.
To be clear: no biotech VC ever invested in Theranos. The people who are actually “savvy” in that industry (everyone) stayed clear because even cursory due diligence revealed the core problem with the science.
That’s what separates competent people from rubes and tech VCs. A bit of due diligence.
+1. It is also possible for tech savvy people to fall for regular scams (automated text in the middle of the night from your bank etc..).
It is 2025 - still banks can't do everything through their apps. To Fintech: Stop SMS based OTP , have better apps. You no longer have the excuse that you can't hire engineers.
A lot of this rings true for me. Myself and maybe 40 other individuals all participated in what now in retrospect was an obvious Ponzi scheme - see SEC vs. Shavers (0)
I even have IRC transcripts to this day where I would ask the dude “this isn’t a scam right?” and I would be reassured until the next day and I’d think about it more, ask more questions and then deposit more damn monies! The greed will subvert all logic if the daily vig is high enough. Or it did to me and I learned an extremely valuable and costly lesson.
Don’t be greedy. Anything that’s too good to be true in investment terms is exactly that: too good to be true. Anyone that can pay 1% interest daily doesn’t need your money. In retrospect it’s obvious and some of the people participating back then were screaming “ponzi” while depositing more and more possibly trying to break it to prove the point. Eventually it got too big and broke.
“Break it to prove a point” would be an accurate description of your average Bitcoin dweeb in 2012-2014 or so. I spent considerable time Sybil attacking and dusting every namecoin address I could at one point. Not for any specific reason just because I could.
After the smoke cleared I punished myself for years, volunteering for things I had no business getting involved in. I hated that I allowed myself to be scammed but it was a multi-year “friendship” that developed pseudo-anonymously over IRC. I don’t make new friends on the internet anymore because I can’t verify authenticity or identity these days unless I can touch you and see you.
Back then it was $7500 I didn’t actually work to earn and I was just letting it ride for 1% interest daily, compounded. I was famously asked on IRC how much I lost and my answer was and still is “more than car, less than a house” - not an attempt to minimize it but to quantify it.
Trendon did his 18 months and if he’s reading this - Yo dawg please stop skipping out on your apartment rent and stay out of small claims court bro, seriously grow tf up.
(0) https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
Court transcript is a wild read if you can find it. Bitcoin is possibly money today because of this case (and by extension, my actions) was filed in Texas where this guy wiped his AWS account, stonewalled both the SEC and FBI on discovery and attempted the defense “Bitcoin isn’t money, I did nothing illegal”
That defense didn’t work.
In any case the parent comment rings true:
-Escalation of trust -Pushing boundaries to find if they exist -Friend-like communication in what should be a business relationship -Trust networks and/or referrals to participate -“sold out” “sorry not accepting new customers” are the best “For Sale” advertisements -Betting bigger or digging a deeper hole
I went off script a bit here, apologies, but the comment triggered a brain dump. People get scammed for different reasons.