There's a Sucker Born Every Minute
Posted On: 2013-09-20
... and I met yet another one today.
There are times when I find it hard to accept that people can't spot a scam when it all but slaps them in the face ... but it seems that there are plenty of those people out there and another one walked into my office today.
Now you would think that a guy in his late fifties who has run his own business and seems to have a reasonable level of intelligence would spot a scam when he sees one but this guy didn't and over the past few years I've had the less than pleasurable experience to bump into maybe as many as ten of them.
They all come to me because my business specialises in building websites for small businesses and they all want basically the same thing. They want a website built that will sell their product ... but they don't actually have a product to sell.
What they have let themselves get caught up in is a pyramid scheme where you pay me and I let you sell that scheme to two or more other people. Those other people then pay the person who paid me and he or she then pays me a cut of what they got ... and so it goes on with money passing up the pyramid and very little of it staying with whoever is at the bottom of the heap.
It can be all wrapped in a number of disguises but the one that most people I've spoken to have fallen for is some sort of personal development program that involves attending very expensive seminars held in some rather exotic locations.
Of course if you don't go to these seminars you don't experience the full benefit of what the scheme is selling and the pressure is really on for you to go. Of those who have come to see me I know of one couple who lost their entire retirement fund as they went to one seminar after another and never discovered how to turn what they had 'learned' into an income stream.
Another guy that came to me used to live just round the corner from us but he doesn't anymore ... he lost his house. He mortgaged his house to pay for all those seminars ... he bought advertising space on billboards ... he invested heavily in other forms of advertising ... and he did no better than the couple I just mentioned.
It's almost as if some people instantly lose their ability to critically analyse an offer that's obviously too good to be true. All they seem to see is the incredible offer of making money from thin air and they can't wait to start throwing their savings at whoever is running the scheme.
And there's no doubt in my mind that the guy who came in today will go exactly the same way as all the others did. They were all brash and so sure that they were going to make a fortune and some of them came back months later in tears to see if I had any suggestions on how they could recover their money. It's so sad to see people ripped off like that.
Now you wouldn't be a sucker for an offer that was too good to be true now would you? You've either been around long enough to be able to spot a scam at 500 yards or you're too smart to get fooled by those scammers aren't you?
Well I certainly hope so because over the years the adult industry has had its fair share of scammers and con merchants who just suck people in like a vacuum cleaner ... take their money ... give them nothing of value in return ... and then spit them out like bits of garbage.
Of course none of those scammers obviously looked like crooks and they were all offering webmasters the chance to make big wads of cash and that's certainly going to look attractive.
But if you took a moment to look before you signed up ...you looked a little deeper ... if you ignored those images of wads of cash ... if you took a few moments to critically analyse the claims and offers they were making ... it would soon become obvious that what they were offering was just too good to be true.
And we all know that if something is too good to be true then it usually is. You would avoid that sort of offer wouldn't you? You wouldn't be like those losers who keep on throwing their money at nothing but dreams and hot air would you?