Large of law numbers. There are a lot of idiots out there. I had a buddy; super nice, super funny guy, late 20's, but financially an idiot.
He sent a $1,000 check as "collateral" to some online "bank" to get a $10,000 "loan". I explained to him that this isn't how any of this works and he just paused and said, "Huh, so should put a stop payment on the second check?" He had sent them another $1,000 as some sort of second round of collateral for the loan or some other nonsense.
And I've known dumber people than him.
> There are a lot of idiots out there.
Tech experts things that everybody not as knowledgeable as them are "stupid". The reality is that everybody has blind spots and fall for a scam. Maybe, you will not fall for this one because you are an expert on technology but you may be victim of some other form of scam.
To call victims "idiots" is an attitude that solves nothing. We should make sure that people gets better on-line safety education with good trustful sources starting on school. This will be too late for some people that grow in a different time and may have problems identifying this type of on-line scams, but it is not for younger generations.
I assume everything is predatory towards my wallet until proven otherwise
Eventually they would have collected $20k of collateral for the loan