(www.cbc.ca)
And that's not even considering perfectly legal "scams" like shitcoin pumps and politicians awarding shady contracts to buisness people who donated to them without a technical bribe happening. I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow. Is the scam-economy 1% of all real financial transations? 5%? 10%? 20%? I'm honestly not sure.
Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.
The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
There are levels to the game everywhere. One example that I can think of is on the timeshare stuff in Mexico where they exploit retired older people into buying fake ownership of something and end up instead just owning a huge debt.
It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
If we wanted better quality stuff and weren't willing to buy cheap crap they would stop selling it or they'd go out of business.
These businesses haven't shifted from selling high quality products to junk quietly and without lowering prices. We all know the quality, how is that a scam?
Amazon, for sure, is well aware of bogus product reviews, and does nothing to fix them. The most galling: hundreds of reviews for products not related to the item.
It's okay to have cheap junk, but not okay to fraudulently pretend it's high quality.
What about selling cheap junk while claiming it is a high-quality long lasting premium product?
while it may be legal, and may be hard to outlaw, it is still a scam
Its also a bit of a fool me once situation. If I believe their quality claims and buy a product to find its junk, shame on them. If I keep going back expecting quality, shame on me.
Most people are fully aware of it, hence why cheap 1 euro shops (nowadays a bit more than that however) are so prevalent across the globe, or buying counterfeit goods at street bazaars.
Most will rather buy something five times, than one good enough that will last.
Which is probably a direct result of things like consumer reports going down the gutter.
With the massive expansion of information available today, reputation should be utterly paramount to sort out the chaff and somehow it’s instead become entirely meaningless
It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?
We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.
From what I have heard & read, the obviousness is either intentional or unintentionally helpful, because it filters out people who would eventually figure out the scam (and would take up the scammers' efforts in the meantime). That said, more complicated frauds like what you're describing will likely proliferate.
Illegal drugs are absolutely a single digit percentage of the economy.
It's called convergence. As we import people from India and China en masse, we become a little bit more like them.
With no corresponding reverse flow, they remain unchanged, so the process is stable for as long as we allow it to be (and for as long as the cultural arbitrage exists.)
This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.
And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.
It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.
I show up at a building 2 blocks from school, a random tenant tells me to form a line by the door that was locked. I was confused because I was the only one there. A second person came in, joined the line. Then a third, fourth, fifth. We were a crowd, standing in front of a door, where I thought I'd interview for a entry level job in tech.
When the door opened and the person on the other side greeted us and a good number of people immediately left. More luck for me to get this job. But turns out, it was going to be a group interview. In fact, not exactly an interview. It was a pitch. And a few lucky ones would have the privilege to sell high tech knives. All we had to do was buy the first batch of knives for something like $300.
"If any of you think you're too good to sell perfume in a parking lot, leave now."
I hadn't even considered I might be too good to sell perfume in a parking lot until that moment, but it turned out that I was.
So annoying.
They all were vibe-coded websites of teams in "Japan," looking to collaborate and encouraging me to jump on a call. I was initially excited (because of this job market) before slowly realizing I was being scammed. If you're a scammer reading this: KYS.
I clicked. Provided a few things. Had an interview within a few days and the offer a day or two later. It was absolutely lovely compared to Monster or ZipRecuiter or CareerBuilder or whatever was popular at the time.
Now the only Apply Now links appear to be resume harvesters or agencies reposting other open reqs.
It is lame, but some people treat perspective employees as a fungible service. =3
As everyone was laid off, nobody inside to contact. Messaged the (by this point former) CTO on LinkedIn, was a surprise to him too.
Even companies I would not have thought did anything scammy.. I've seen very obvious fake people, 100s, maybe 1000s of AI bots (just my guess) posting fake posts (what's it like having a job in marketing these days?) claiming to love the product, or even bash / make up fake stories about their competition.
Some of this is obvious to me but I can see that a lot of people don't notice and start trying to engage with the bots. Maybe it has to do with people's assumptions that they can easily detect AI - but its only the super obvious / lower effort stuff that's 'slop' looking. Plenty of it looks human, you have to spend time digging in like a P.I. to figure out the truth.
That’s not how they make money though. They make money by selling listings.
Same mistake that people make about journalism (including journalists). The amount of news reported is a function of ads sold.
Most of them are simply deprioritized and situationally used. Most companies with more than 50 employees (and less than 5,000 let's say) want something more like a pipeline. They often have some interchangeable work and might decide to hire 3 SWEs. So they interview a pool and eventually fill the 3 roles. But why take down the listing? When they post they get 1,000 resumes instantly, but every week they get 100 new ones. So if they decide to hire again they just cull the top 50 most recent and take a look. You could be the best person in the world but if you are resume 51, you are ignored.
AI (on both sides) and hiring manager laziness has made lucky timing the most important factor for any hiring chance.
life taught me that living well grants you admission to heaven here while you're alive, while committing things society still considers sin makes you live through hell right here on earth
cant imagine how much better/worse it gets if theres more after death
editing seems to be an emergent property :P
Unless you mean life skills to survive corporate culture. Then you just look out for your self,but give the impression you care lol. None of it's real relationships anyway
No, the hard part is teaching them on how to _actively_ do bad things. To actively seek out people that can be taken advantage, and to actively seek out ways to take advantage of said people. To be in that mindset all the time, so it becomes their nature. i.e. to be a hacker of people and society.
As a parent of two young boys I've had the same concerns, but I would rather have them grow up to be men of virtue in poverty that can go to bed at night with a clear conscience than the most powerful man in the world without integrity.
I've got a friend, who is on SSDI due to mental and physical health issues. And yes, they are real. I've known this friend for 20 years, they are a good person, but they have serious challenges integrating into society between past trauma and the MH/PH problems.
Her sister often 'borrows'[0] from her food stamps or SSDI income to pay for her own shit. Her sister's husband gets a new car every 1-2 years, charges his wife (the sister) and their daughter rent every month, and votes in a specific way because 'people are scamming away our tax dollars'.
IOW, "You're right but it's curious to look at the people who think that and how they pose"
[0] - Often without properly repaying
The money for those payments is taken from me, from all taxpayers, under threat of violence from the government.
Seriously, this platform is a big shitshow - lots of premium profiles posting AI-polished or AI-generated posts, corporate bootlickers, cringe posts, messages from random recruiters who didn't even bother to read your description.