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Nigerian Scammers Claim Another Victim
A Florida newspaper ran a story yesterday about a local retiree who fell hard for a 419 scam. The story goes into depth on the methods used to play on the target's beliefs and gain his confidence - in this case, the target (who lost $320,000) is still having a hard time accepting that they were thieves. Truly remarkable.
This site.... that should convince him he was scammed...
As the article says, most of that money is in new debt. He'll never be able to pay it back, so it will become the loss of the finance companies. They will raise the interest rates we have to pay in order to recoup that money.
And of course, since the guy will lose his home and has no money, he'll have to go on welfare to get his rent and food money. He won't be able to pay for his health care co-payments any longer, so he'll bail on those bills, making his doctors and hospitals raise their rates for paying customers and insurance companies.
Yes, he was stupid, his life will be crap, but we are the ones that have to pay for his stupidity!
I'm not quick to blame the victim in this case.
My mother is 88 years old. You would not believe some of the scams that target the elderly. The ones I've seen are, surprisingly enough, quite legal. For example, selling reports on lotteries you may have won or soliciting for charities that keep practically all the money for themselves.
Some of the elderly do have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Most do not. For those who do it's partly it's because of problems that happen to people who grow quite old -- and sometimes it's due to having grown up and aged in an era in which normal people were not targeted by frauds.
If the man in this story was, say 43 or 53, I'd be much harsher. But, by 73, he could be suffering from some problems that limit his ability to understand reality.
What should be done? Damned if I know for sure. But I think younger relatives should keep a close eye on their elders. That way you can limit the damage done to Mom or Granddad by this kind of scum.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
The lottery is occasionally in your favor, when it has gone several weeks without a winner, so the prize is very large. (Yes, that does attract more players, but not enough more to compensate for the larger prize).
The Nigerian scam is never in your favor. :-)
There is an interesting case included in income tax caselaw books, where a consortium of Australian investors tried to buy one of each possible combination for such a lottery. Buying tickets turned out to take longer than they thought, so they only got about half what they wanted, but still won most of the prizes, including all the big ones, and so made a nice profit. The case is in the books because there was some question over how to tax this.
Tax law cases are often a lot more interesting than other cases, because people put a lot more thought into avoiding taxes than they do to most other things. People who would only devote a few minutes to planning a murder will spend weeks trying to figure out how to deduct the cost of the bullets. :-) (This also makes it hard. I've got a B.S. degree in math from Caltech, and never in my life have numbers so confused as they did when we studied partnership taxation in law school)
That ignores the utility value of money, which acts as a coefficient to the payoff, rises and falls in a non-linear way, and reacts differently for loss than for gain.
Utility theory is also why it taxing 10% of a blue collar worker's income hurts more than taxing 50% of Bill Gates'. There's a vast difference in value between the utility of 10,000 dollars and 9,000 dollars (it may be the difference between paying rent and not having a home) and less of a relative gulf in utility between 20 billion and 40 billion dollars.