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One of my favorite scam stories from Dark Net Diaries is in one of the preambles and talks about an investment “advisor”.
You get a call from them about a stock tip about a stock going up, and they are like, you dont have to beleive me, just watch it. It goes up.
They call back the next week with a new stock tip talking about how they were right and made so much money. Again, they dont ask for an investment, just that you watch the stock. It goes up again.
They call back the next week with the ask.
Turns out, they were calling 1000 people, 500 going up, 500 going down. They called everyone that they had a right prediction for the second week. Same process 250 up, 250 down. They again call everyone that they had it right for.
Such a cool scam.
There’s a great episode of Derren Brown with this scam, but related to horse race betting
I sometimes get SMSes saying “Hi dad, I have a new number. Please write me on WhatsApp” and I get it, you send to enough people and there will be enough dads and everyone else is like Wtf and moves on. Once the SMS said “Hi mom/dad …” and I was like c’mon, pick one or lose both
My mums boyfriend fell for that one. I never understood it - why not call them on their “old number” and confirm first that it’s no longer valid. And once they ask for money, why not ask them to call you first to confirm?
He isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, so I’m not realy surprised he fell for it.
I first read about this story in Fooled by randomness.
A guy starts talking about “hard work” and yeah dude you probably did work hard, but you also offhandedly mentioned receiving half of a million dollars from people in your life who “believed in [you]” and I’d like for you to elaborate on that.
I used to see a lot of “I paid off my student loans in 18 months, here’s how. I saved all my money and got a director job from my FIL / Mom gave me a house / my spouse paid for it. Just work hard and you can too!” I think I saw one legitimate one of “worked hard as a nurse and paid it off in 7 years” out of 10.
I paid off my student loans by closing my eyes and going “lalalalala I can’t hear you” to my account. My story is so inspiring, that I keep getting calls about my loans now.
I paid of my student loans by living in Germany and having middle income parents, thus never actually having borrowed anything.
Not just speakers, bosses, authors, celebrities, and on and on. To be fair it’s hard to see how you couldn’t have been successful.
Without books like Fooled by Randomness I’m not sure I would know the difference.
Maybe we need more books about people who did everything right and still failed
Alt text: They say you can’t argue with results, but what kind of defeatist attitude is that? If you stick with it, you can argue with ANYTHING.
