“Executive-level income without leaving home” claims the Facebook page, a sign at the end of my street promises a six figure wage from your own computer and one of the lead stories in this morning’s news is the tale of retirees being ripped off by ‘boiler rooms’ offering high return ‘investments’.
We all believe we have the right to be rich so the quick, easy option and the promises of those that say we can be wealthy by simply handing over a modest amount of money or trusting our investments to someone else is a tempting offer.
Deep down we know we’re being scammed.
Right now nations are on the verge of collapse because politicians promised easy wealth, corporations skirt bankruptcy because executives were entitled to bonuses regardless of performance and in the suburbs desperate people clinging to the middle class lifestyle they believed was theirs by birthright fall for get rich quick scams.
Just as the railways opened up opportunities for snake oil merchants in the 1850s and cheap telephone systems gave rise to the boiler room ripoffs of the 1970s and 80s, social media tools open up a whole new range of possibilities for the sneaky to fool the gullible or desperate.
Naturally we’ll get the nanny goats and nincompoops demanding something be done about Internet scams – maybe a law, perhaps a treaty or a code of conduct – all of which will be as effective as stopping railways, telephones or the postal system in an effort to stamp out fraud.
Fraud is technologically neutral; fraudsters just use whatever happens to be the most effective tools available at the time.
The sad thing with the social media based scams is we get to see who among our friends and family have fallen for it. Invariably when we warn them we’re told off because we aren’t believers.
Again though this is nothing new, the same thing happened when the snake oil merchant came to town or the shaman visited the village.
In the 19th Century the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute” was coined. In today’s hyper connected world, there’s one born every second. Don’t be that sucker.