In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers - not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate “retail investors” who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr I found a scammer on TikTok, she apparently has a real Ph.D (physics) and an actual non-profit and if you can just get her 10 million dollars, her 100% effective and very real cure for cancer will be available and free for all.
She’s already gained at least 2.5m dollars. I submitted a complaint to her state’s attorney general but I have little hope it’ll go anywhere.
@Beeks@mstdn.party @pluralistic@mamot.fr
When l got my cancer diagnosis, l did not appreciate the extent to which l would have to protect myself from scammers and quacks.
@PaulInRainCity@heads.social @Beeks@mstdn.party @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Unfortunately, there’s a whole cottage industry of scammers preying on people in desperate situations.
@PaulInRainCity @Beeks @pluralistic I’m curious about your experience. Do you mean the difficulty of defending yourself mentally/psychologically, or something else?
I was diagnosed with cancer 4 years ago today, and haven’t found scammers to be part of my experience
@PaulInRainCity@heads.social @Beeks@mstdn.party @pluralistic@mamot.fr the worst I ever had to deal with was a well-meaning but misguided open source colleague who, er, mistook me for a Steve on another continent and suggested I travel to Slovenia for cutting edge medicine that could cure any cancer with CAR-T therapy (which is basically inapplicable to my solid tumor cancer)