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I was sat doing very little having an easy Sunday afternoon trawling facebook when I noticed an ad that promised thousands of dollars working from home.  Like any of these ads it was a scam but with the economy the way it is it peaked my curiosity I followed the link which led to emillionaire.  The banner and nature all seemed pretty genuine but then why wouldn’t it.  If you are going to set up a scam it has to be believable testimonials trusted blue chip corporate logos none of which have any affiliation with the scam. I then google searched this company to see just how many people had been duped and found any number of different comments from people on various forums of people who had been duped by this ad.   Some were venting their frustration at Facebook for putting up such an advert and taking money from such a company, some blamed Google as the companies logo was plastered across the sign up page on the company site. However, most people were just feeling pretty stupid with themselves for being taken in by a scam.  The old adage if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is seems to have gone out of the window for these people.  The sums of money involved were not huge I think the most someone had lost was 197 USD. However, that wasn’t the point.  The point was that at times like these the quickest and easiest way to make money is playing off the insecurity and desperation of people who are really struggling. 

It seemed in sharp contrast to the people who lost money with Madoff in the alleged fraud. These were people who had money a lot of money in many cases and wanted more again nobody seemed to apply the too good to be true idea. Here people seemed to be literally falling over themselves to give him money. His name alone should have been a clue. In both cases there are victims and it is easy to feel for them and their personal circumstances. Indeed at least one Madoff investor tragically took his own life. It would seem there are a lot of victims of “too good to be true schemes” and as things continue to deterirate there will probably be many more. However, the one underlying basic principle that we never seem to learn is that greed isn’t good. Greed is greed and as long as people think they can get rich quick their will always be crooks willing to prey on people who are too vain or too desperate to ignore all the lessons previous scams.