If you can imagine a scam, so can somebody else who is willing to try it out. Not to mention a lot you couldn’t imagine, even if you tried. There’s a whole universe of people out there trying hard to find ways to separate other people from their money. This runs from the moocher on the street to the billionaire in a Manhattan office tower, working on his next billion, hiring very smart people to come up with flashy ads that appeal to people’s vanity, greed, desire for status, for ‘coolness,’ for belonging.
It’s a more or less constant assault and it includes whoever is hijacking email addresses and sending emails in the names of friends and acquaintances, tempting the recipients to click on links. This happened several times at The Leader last week. A few people fall for such things, presumably. Others learn to recognize it for what it is and won’t open anything if it looks even slightly suspicious.
An unintended consequence is likely that legitimate communication sometimes gets trashed because the flood of scam material induces paranoia. Dealing with this stuff and not being taken to the cleaners requires of level of sophistication and discernment that many simply don’t have. And they get sucked in. Others don’t get sucked in, but they become hardened, cynical, jaded.
Either way, it’s kind of sad.