• BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    This is a great point and an important lesson: part of what makes scams so appealing is that they stroke your ego. A lot of them rely on the mark believing they’re somehow better and different than all the people who got swindled, ignoring the fact that there is no correlation between all the victims besides “they all participated in this scam.”

    For example, a lot of sleight-of-hand gamers will let other marks see the sleight of hand while someone is playing. This makes them feel like they’re in on the secret and can’t be fooled by the scammer. What they fail to realize is that the first mark was actually in on it, and the scam happens off the table when you get pickpocketed, or other plants in the crowd “accidentally” jostle you distracting you from the table, or the 6’8", 320 lbs guy named Tinkerbell with the brass knuckles is suddenly very insistent that you must be cheating to win so much and you owe homeboy his money back (and some crowd members are even saying they saw you cheat???)

    Scams above all rely on controlling the environment. If you “see through it and know how to come out on top” no you don’t, and no you won’t; it’s almost certainly just another layer of the scam.