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How Do They Do It

Scammers like to appeal to your vulnerabilities. We all have a few vulnerabilities that they attack with their own casual subtlety – despair, greed, opportunity, generosity, friendliness, availability of funds, timeliness and convincing others.

Trend Micro explains fraud as: “Sites that attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence, used in the classical sense of trust. They often play confidence tricks to exploit typical human characteristics such as greed, dishonesty, vanity, opportunism, lust, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, desperation, and naivety.”

Traits of a Scammer

  • Dishonesty – the primal mode of a scammer is deceit, working from behind a mask that you will never meet. Through a series of lies and untruths, they work to convince you through what they are presenting is a genuine deal, and the steps that you need to take in order to be part of their program.
  • Vanity – full of self-importance and conceit, scammers will want to protect themselves against any form of accusation, and will talk at length to convince you that although there were these accusations floating around, that they have dealt with it and things are working in full functioning order.
  • Opportunism – scammers present a time-limited opportunity that forces you to take action. They are brilliant at marketing, with their website painting a solid and convincing picture that their system or company has been established for a while with many happy customers around the globe.
  • Lust – scammers stir up desires of longing, yearning and envy to paint a picture of hope for you to hold onto. They appeal to your emotions and aim to buy your trust at an emotional level, which helps to by-pass logic and your normal tests of whether something is true or false.
  • Compassion – scammers initially set you up with kind words of encouragement, appealing with sympathy and empathy for your concern. However this is simply a cover up which will get you off guard, to gain your attention and hopefully open your wallet for them to help themselves!
  • Generosity – their appeal to you will be on a very generous basis. They want you to feel that you are receiving a bargain, and if you act soon enough there will be enough to go around. The only one being generous is YOU when you hand over the funds.
  • Friendliness – once they make contact, usually through an App or Messenger, they will be sweet talking you with all the information that you may want to know. Their intent is to build trust and rapport, so as to persuade you to hand over your cash. Once things stop working, they are hard to get hold of by stone walling you out, shutting you down or ignoring you. Since there is really no personal basis to the relationship, they don’t care how you feel. You’ve simply enabled their lifestyle.
  • Timeliness – the opportunity is usually always wrapped in a coating of “limited time only” or a “bonus season”. The scammers want you to make a move quickly so that you don’t miss out. This prevents you from doing your due diligence, and asking around like you should have done in the first place.

Traits of a Desperate Investor

  • Naivety – this is an innocent lack of understanding that certain people use against others to convince them to do things that can actually harm them, once they have built rapport and trust with them
  • Irresponsibility – not many people would simply throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars simply to get rid of loose change. Scammers are reckless and careless about your funds, only to use it for their own benefits, and have absolutely no intention of returning them to you. If sent using bitcoin, it is hard to retrieve the funds.
  • Desperation – if you’ve recently been through an emotional struggle or lost income from elsewhere, they tap into your lowered emotional energy with promises of a large capital return, which then seem to ease your pain.
  • Greed – the opportunity they present will have an unbelievable element of personal gain involved. Is it too good to be true ? (Perhaps it is ?!) You don’t intend to be greedy, it’s just that they seem to be overly generous with their offer, and you should act on it quickly.
  • Opportunity – this is the part which is the hook in the bait. If you have a chance to make 100% ROI within a short timeframe, with very little work – they do all the work for you – what a great opportunity to get ahead. They’ve got you hook, line and sinker.
  • Availability of funds – some people give what they have on hand, others see the “opportunity” and dip into funds that they borrow or don’t have.
  • Convince others – the opportunity is so good to be true, that you have to let others know. This is not always part of their plan, but there is usually a referral link so that you can introduce friends and family and get a 10% kickback for your generosity.

Make note that they are not there to be your friend.

They are there to “ethically” steal your money. I say “ethically” because they are going to rob you for it – they are going to present you a set of opportunities that look like will assist you in the short to long term, and you are willingly going to provide the funds for them to enact their plan on your behalf.

There is usually no way that they can get into your online accounts (unless you have been careless with passwords, or have let them into your account with a remote session), they need you to provide funds to them in a way that seems best for both of you.

Only problem is that once it leaves your account, it’s in their account forever, to do what they want with it, with no guarantees that it will ever be returned.

Even if there is some evidence that they are paying a daily bonus, then this short term “return of funds to investors” is only used to convince others to join the party, and invest much larger amounts with them.