Seriously, I know this is influenced by my personal beef and disdain for con artists but how do we allow such obvious scams to proliferate? I have a family member who has fallen into one of these things and it just makes me depressed. They're insidious because they prey on the same desire to achieve something without knowing how, but unlike Amway these don't have a physical product and you're "helping" someone so they don't feel like pyramid schemes to the people in them. She simultaneously says it's her hobby (when addressed about why she spends so much money and time on it for no reward) and her business whenever she anything goes right. She even once went to an accountant to try and write things off as business expenses but he said she couldn't because on paper the business was illegitimate (he told her she should legally consider it a hobby). The scum who run these things feed on older peoples' feelings of loss and missed career opportunities because of life choices like having a family. Hers is especially targeted towards boomer women with a new agey "tapping" element, something about how tapping on your meridian points aligns your chakras and emotion energies which channels your focus and allows you to harness your inner self to manifest career opportunities and expand your wealth and client base. She buys all these books written by people who put "M.D., P.h.D., B.S.," on their book cover without saying their degrees are in engineering, library science, and dentistry. This shit just drives me insane. Are people getting conned like this genuinely oblivious or deep down do they know it's all fake and just accept that they're paying all this money for nothing? She came close to admitting the latter once and said "I know it sounds crazy but if it works for other people why couldn't it work for me too?"

  • plinky [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    :yea: in larger way, it’s substituting/augmenting religion (hoping to change stuff outside of your control), but on smaller scale it’s just :yea:

    Dunno, I don’t think anyone anywhere solved conmen phenomena, business guru is just latest iteration. For more cynical people snapback is much easier from them (if it worked in making money, why don’t they do it and not selling doing it to other people/if they are so happy to share why do they ask for money),but with older people just feels me with rage and annoyance at those snakeoil people. I also don’t get why person who can see through me in childhood asking for candy, can’t see same shit with some dude who they haven’t met :meow-tableflip: