Slashdot Mirror
Woman Admits Sending $400K To Nigerian Scammer
svnt writes "Janella Spears wiped out her husband's retirement account, remortgaged their paid-for house, and took out a lien against the family car in an attempt to cash in on the deal. A undercover officer involved with the investigation called it the worst example of the scam he's ever seen. Thoughtfully, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim."
"It is immoral to allow a sucker to keep their money."
I am officially gone from
"For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted."
Slashdot is not exactly going to be a sympathetic crowd here. What we have is an intelligent person who ignored every single bit of advice from a multitude of sources in favor of outright greed. So now she wants to warn people, but is it really going to do any good? She clearly would have ignored the advice she is now giving.
yes, for most of us here on slashdot, this is incredibly brain dead, but in general, there is a problem with you if you blame the victim for a crime, no matter how foolish or stupid they acted
whether a rape victim for wearing revealing clothes, or a guy walking in a dangerous neighborhood at night, yes: you can attack the victim, but if you want to actually claim any moral highground (which many of you seem to assume with a withering condescending tone as you blame the victim), the person who bears 100% responsibility and accountability for a crime is the criminal themselves, and only the criminal, and no one else
using knowledge and care to avoid crime is of course an important aspect of any behavior, but just because someone fails to do this, for any reason, does not mean they share blame for being victimized: a transgression is a transgression is a transgression. no one ASKS to be victimized in such a horrible way
if you walk by the front door of a house, and the house is wide open, and no one is home, and in plain site is a stack of 20 dollar bills, you are 100% responsible and culpable if you take that stack of $20s. the person who left them there like that is, yes, pretty stupid. but they deserve zero blame. the criminal, ALWAYS the criminal is responsible for the trangressions that the criminal freely chooses to commit
any other opinion on the issue is, frankly, not morally or philosophically coherent
although, for some you then, by all means, heckle the woman who gave away $$00K, since some of you honeslty and openly claim no moral high ground
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yet, somehow she thinks that sharing HER story with the world will convince other people? If only someone had shared their story with her, she could have avoided this terrible mess, so she's going to make sure it doesn't happen to others? Please. Even in acknowledging her stupidity, she shows no sense.
What? Nigerian scams are lies. Casinos post the rules, and play by them. And you can actually win a little in a casino. No one ever won by sending money to a Nigerian.
everything in moderation
Intent has nothing to do with blame.
I'm not talking about how much people should be punished. As far as I'm aware that was not even brought up in the thread. I am talking about whose fault a particular outcome is.
If I carry out an action with well-known consequences then I am at fault for those consequences. This is true whether I'm parking illegally and getting a ticket, climbing a tree in a thunderstorm and getting struck by lightning, or giving a scammer money and getting ripped off.
Certainly, what the scammer did was morally and legally wrong and what this woman did was not. But that is orthogonal to the fact that it is this woman's fault that she got ripped off. (And it is also the scammer's fault for ripping her off.)
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
That's why we have courts to rule people incompetent.
That's my thoughts--anyone as DUMB as she is won't believe her!
But this is beyond stupidity--she is clearly mentally ill and you've got to wonder why the husband, banks, family members ALLOWED this to go on. It wasn't like no one knew what she was doing. Why couldn't they have her name removed from accounts and not allowed access to the funds...declare her mentally unfit or whatever it took?
This is similar to those stories you hear once and awhile on how some old person spent thousands on magazines they didn't need, thinking it would help them win the Publisher's Clearing House prize.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
You're the one who seems confused here.
There are three utterly separate concepts at play here, and you seem insistent for reasons I cannot comprehend to squish them all into a single idea:
Any combination of these three ideas can be found in real life. As there are eight different combinations I'm not going to bother coming up with examples of all of them, but it should be pretty clear that they can happen.
Note that I am not talking about punishment, or anything of the sort. The scammers should be punished, end of story. But that doesn't change the fact that it was this woman's own damned fault for being such an idiot that she got scammed. That doesn't mean I think that she deserves it or that she should be punished or anything like that. Please, if you are going to argue, argue based on what I actually say and not these crazy ideas you imagine I believe.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Some people think that there are things in this world which are more important than money... a couple of them being trust and love. I think if and when you figure this out you will be a lot better off.
People's common sense simply gets blinded out by greed. Its sad.
Can all fish swim?
"Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold."
Call me amoral, but if she makes enough money that it only takes 3-4 years to get out of $400,000 in debt, I don't feel bad for her.
I'm sure there are people blowing a couple year-s salaries in Vegas every day... they only have slightly better odds then her at getting money and are just as gullible.
Look, I don't get it.
I'm not particularly ambitious, corporate-ladder wise, but I make decent money IMO.
But I'm not insanely stupid with my money, either.
Yet I don't have $400,000 to blow.
If I did, I sure as fuck wouldn't give it to MR AKELE MBUMBA OF NIGERIA.
What I don't understand is: How does someone so stupid have so much money?
Anyone?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The basic rule of any con is that "You can't cheat an honest person". Greed and the mark's belief that they are somehow beating the scammer drive the mark's behaviour. Stupidity doesn't necessarily come into it.
But she was definitely stupid to ignore *everyone's* advice. I feel sorry for her husband.
Janella Spears doesn't think she's a sucker or an easy mark.
Many people like to believe that they are basically intelligent. They may readily admit that they don't know everything, but insist that they have a pretty good handle on most (if not all) of the really important things.
Far fewer people are actually willing to take the actions necessary to make such a belief true. Being "basically intelligent" requires that one make study and reflection part of one's lifestyle. Stopping with that once one graduates from school more-or-less guarantees that one is not, and will never be, "basically intelligent."
The real problem I have with this is that stupid people are not only a danger to themselves; they are a danger to those around them. Stupid people vote in favor of harmful/oppressive laws (or candidates), drive dangerously, harm the economy through poor money-management practices, harm their friends and family (sometimes emotionally, sometimes financially, sometimes physically) through stupid lifestyle practices, and so on.
In my opinion, it is every human's moral obligation to regularly invest a portion of their week to the business of improving their own cognitive abilities. And I don't just mean memorizing facts, but also engaging the mind's critical thinking capacities. One must be presented with genuine intellectual challenge in order to improve intelligence. One must, in other words, do things that are hard, since sticking with easy tasks will not produce the desired result.
And for God's sake, read Personal Finance for Dummies. If you haven't read it, stop trying to convince yourself you already know how money works. The book costs 15 bucks...just freaking READ IT!
Look, she screwed up (and big time) .Cut some slack now, so you won't be ridiculed later on.
But she is old and probably grew old before internet and probably never traveled much (considering her background, seemly very likely -teacher and a priest of some sort -both very local professions). So there is some reason why she believed everything she was told. And she spent till she could spend no more.
She is gullible, but now she is taking a very, very brave decision, which is to admit her mistakes publicly.
The hope here is that there are two thresholds to spending - one one the amount of information and the other on the amount of money.When you get to either of them you stop sending money to Nigeria
She clearly did not get to her threshold of info before she got to the threshold of money. Hopefully by sharing her story, she is raising the awareness in other people who may be being scammed and they will back out of the stupidity before they hit the threshold of money themselves.
Another way of looking at it is that while the cost of going public is very very high and she alone bears the costs, she hopes that there is some (small, LordKronos says) limited benefit to doing this. Moreover she wont reap the benefits, the public will. So what she is doing is actually a good thing.
I'll ignore her stupidity considering it has limited impact on me, but will applaud the fact she went public with the info (since it provides some benefit to me -if nothing else, helps calculating the odds of being conned).
If nothing else, show some concern for old people and people who are not as smart as you are. Brain does'nt remain what it is in the youth and this is inevitable for you an me
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
An IQ of 100 is the 50th percentile. You have exactly half the world stupider than you, and half the world smarter than you.
Correction: what it means is half the world scores worse than you on some random test, and half the world scores better.
153, last test I took.
Doesn't mean I'm motivated, good at life OR immune to being suckered in. Just good at solving puzzles, reasoning and logic problems.
I have been an idiot many times. I have made stupid mistakes which cost me a great deal of time and money. I blame myself as much as is appropriate for those mistakes.
One time my wallet was stolen by a pickpocket. Of course the pickpocket gets the blame for this. But so do I. I was stupid. I stood in a crowded area known for pickpocketing and did nothing to protect my wallet. Logical consequence of these actions: my wallet was no longer there. Because this was my fault (AND the pickpocket's fault) I knew that there were things I could do to protect myself in the future. I learned my lesson, and have not been a victim of pickpocketing since.
I'm not enabling anyone. You seem to continually ignore the fact that in the class of crimes under discussion, I am blaming both the victim and the criminal. If the victim took knowing steps which resulted in the crime, then they absolutely deserve blame. This is a separate issue from the question of whether or not to blame the criminal.
Blame is not a zero-sum game. It does not get divided in half when you spread it to two people.
Sometimes something bad happens and nobody is at fault.
Sometimes something bad happens and everybody involved is at fault.
Sometimes something bad happens and only some of the people involved are at fault.
By examining cases in which I could potentially be involved, looking at who is at fault, and seeing what those people could have done to avoid the situation, I am able to learn from other people's mistakes.
Saying that you must never blame the victim puts you in a situation where you can never take any action to reduce your chance of being a victim. Which is simply not how the world works. You can absolutely take actions which reduce your chances of being a victim of crime, and you should.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Why is she actively disturbing evolution?
I think it's a good thing to take resources from the stupid, and give it to the smart. And that's what's happening. Even if you do not like it. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
My mother works at a bank and she has to talk people out of these scams on a regular basis
I always knew that these scams were practically a national pastime in Nigeria, but what I didn't know is that not only do people still fall for these things (apparently in droves)... but often it takes a small army of professional hostage negotiators to talk them out of wiring their entire life's savings to a total stranger over in a country whose rate of societal corruption rivals OURS!!
The reality of it all is what blows me away!
You are where you are at the time you are there.
The basic rule of any con is that "You can't cheat an honest person".
Except for the "starving children" scams that prey on a person's honesty. Lots of those, and they like praying on religious communities.
open source modern art: laser taggi
Yeah, that's the part that I don't get.
At what point did her husband take the stupid pill and forgot to take away her options of ruining him?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You hit the nail exactly on the head.
Its not only sad, it seems to be a fundamental part of human nature. Witness the recent economic "meltdown". When the impulse to have that which you don't overpowers your common-sense - that's greed. People wanting to buy their own little mansion when common-sense tells you there is no way they can afford it? Greed. People wanting to push ridiculous loans on unsuspecting marks without thinking there would be repurcussions? Greed. Financiers buying "securitised" debt with one eye closed to the obvious flakiness of the underlying asset? Greed. Politicians and central bankers blithely greasing the wheels of this ridiculous machine by loosening regulation and increasing the money supply all the while trying to convince themselves and the public that its not all one big pyramid scheme? Greed.
For future reference:
Nothing comes out of nothing. Not energy and not money (defined here as actual, real purchasing power, not pieces of paper with funny symbols on it).
Out of interest, has anybody done any reading regarding the evolutionary basis of greed?
Greed is beneficial as long as the greedy individual can keep what he or she obtains. Greedy individuals can better support their offspring, who generally share their greedy genes. The balance between greed and altruism basically depends on the general wisdom of society. The more altruistic people are, the more greedy people can benefit, but the less altruistic people are, the less they benefit from cooperation. A stable point is where there is just enough altruism and greed to consume all the available resources without too many people getting upset and changing the gene pool with a shotgun.
Tell that to the taxpayers who have just bailed out Wall Street...
It's not greed. It's avoidance of cognitive dissonance. Once people have some involvement in something, they tend to filter data which would make it untrue. It's the same thing that happens with militantly religious (or anti-religious) people; they gradually develop filters that allow them to preemptively exclude any data which might make them les comfortable with their amazing qualities and superiority.
It's hard to get someone to bite for a few hundred dollars on a scam -- but once you have that first part, it's very easy to keep getting more, because admitting that they were scammed would make them feel awful.
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