Is This A Golden Age of Fraud?

A video about how "passive income" money-making scams seem to have taken over the world, and the economic implications of such scams.

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[Bobbbybags]

I appreciate you putting Grant Cardone as the thumbnail. Too many people worship this clown and have no idea what a shady grifter he is. Blows my mind.

[EnriquePerezBarahona]

My aunt was an MLM queen and then a cryptocurrency seller. And there came a point where I absolutely believe she got swept away in the easy money, which she cleaned using real estate that she then rented. She made good money, but the trail of destruction she left with people who bought into her pitch was sad. One guy, an elderly Latino man who couldn’t even speak English, invested $64, 000 with her, his life savings, and was totally wiped out. He died, and my aunt just walked away while the guy’s daughter struggled to raise funds for his funeral. So sad.

[meehanasap]

I love the line, "he must have gotten tired of the passive income..."

[spiritualanarchist]

I work with people who have unsolvable debts in the Netherlands . More and more young people end up having huge debts before they reach 30, because they trusted scammers. People often forget the 'most start up businesses fail 'part . Because most people who failed obviously don't feel like sharing out of fear being called a 'loser', all attention goes to those who succeeded. This creates a false narrative. A lot of young people that are successful often have rich parents (or other financial backup) to try and fail a few times before succeeding . There's this social media induced illusion that everyone and their mother can start a business and become financially independent without too much problems.. This is when the scammers come in with sweet promises and no guarantees .

[RyonBeachner]

Man this video was refreshing. To hear someone reputable actually lay out the reality of how much money is needed to make real ‘full time’ income from investing, as well as recognizing how hard small business actually is. I have a small business, and have worked ungodly hours, while being constantly gaslit by social media and self titled “entrepreneurs” to think that maybe I’m the moron because it’s not been easy, but as time has gone on, I’ve found these types to be frauds and grifters that blow away in a few years.

[ladyeowyn]

I work in retail fraud prevention. 2022 and 2023 have been off the charts across the industry.

[liam]

"you have to sometimes do the stuff that doesn't work in order to find out what does". Worked many years in R&D, absolutely back this.

[incremental_failure]

Being raised honest is a major problem nowadays. Scammers are making fortunes and there's so many that they drive up prices for everyone. This is how economic systems fail. When people eventually don't believe in the system any longer, it falls apart fast.

[RaderizDorret]

One of my personal favorite "passive income" schemes is doing Drop Shipping. When I looked into it, the first words out of my mouth were "this is just being a Digital Avon rep!"

[ai]

Fraud is definitely one of the top growth sectors, currently. I think it's due to the ease of executing scams with all the communications technology we now have, combined with laws that have not evolved to keep up. And, at least in the US, the "getting all the money you can" is deeply embedded into the culture. So much that I think most scammers genuinely think they aren't doing anything wrong.

[FirstLast-cgnk]

Ea Nasir, a Mesopotamian merchant, is famed for having the first written customer complaints against him, with stone tablets proclaiming that he sold bad copper nearly 4000 years ago. As shown by 16:40 he is clearly still with us, having committed fraud against death itself to remain among the living.

[ollicron]

I love that your talk with coffee pulled me out of my feeling of dread. Because I was seeing people around my age of the later 20s and thinking about what it was that I was doing wrong.

And it turns out that a lot of them are sociopathic fraudsters and not only that they flaunt wealth they dont actually have, or engage in illegal activities. Also most of those people who are making much cash are just skilless influencers whose job is just to edit videos and profit from attention/lying to people. Not that it's bad to make millions from YouTube, but ideally most of us don't want fame.

[nothanks]

You can’t apply to a job without exposing yourself to scammers now

[LordMogatron]

I finally read "The 4-Hour Workweek, " and it opened my eyes to how many 'hustle, rise-and-grind, multiple streams of income' people I've worked with who had committed that book to memory.

[Aceks]

Running a small business is not easy, I took over my father's business in 2001, and I ran it for about 11 years. Running a small business requires a lot of time, at times you will be working 7 days a week 12 hours/day. You have to deal with all kinds of problems, like shoplifting, getting bad checks, taking losses for items that don't move, dealing with a economic downturn, paying fees to the city/state/federal government, etc.

[joeltucci]

I think it’s important to also note the advances in toolsets that scammers now have at their disposal. The proliferation of internet technology around the globe, the ease of capital, not just cash and crypto but even gift cards, crossing borders and now chatbots that can customize scripts and mimic voices give scammers a much wider reach.

[mbg]

Please do a vid about "choosing our parents wisely", I need to improve my life choices.

[lilhaxxor]

Thank you for this fantastic report. Several of my own friends are people that I had to cut off because they now think scamming people is an acceptable business model. I tried to be kind and help them at my own expense, and paid the price (got dragged into crypto, lent some money, etc.). It's sad that society turned out this way, where destroying people you know is perceived as the best way to get ahead. 😢

[chris]

I feel like in my adult life (graduated in 2008) it’s felt like work is almost a scam, like all the things you’re “supposed” to do to have stability and prosperity were just a bill of goods, and I always kind of half assumed that people savvier than me were up to some hustle that was over my head. I never personally fell for any of these investment or passive income scams because I assumed that they required the sort of extroverted, go-getter, hustler personality that you also need for normal sales jobs and I just didn’t have. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve realized how much of that stuff was scams, and how much I was falling for it in an emotional way even if I never lost any money in it. But as the non-scam opportunities for success wither, I suppose this is what you get.

[maxwellsdemon]

My favorite play of words is in german where self employed is a portmanteau "selbstständig". "selbst" is self and "ständig" means standing in this context, but could also mean "always".
So a common phrase is, that being self employed means you have to do it yourself and do it all the time.