Why do old scams always work?

 Why do old scams always work?

With Bitcoin’s price surging in recent days, the market sentiment turned to FOMO. As usual, I got messages from friends seeking advice on cryptocurrency tokens.

This time It is a combination of gamefi, high yield, and multi-level marketing. A quick Google search revealed a strange symbol with approximately 500 holders and a daily trading volume of 8000 USD on a small exchange. The market cap of this token was an amazing number: 4 billion dollars, with its price skyrocketing ten thousand times in just three months.

You may think that was an awesome investment opportunity. Imagine if if someone had invested $1000 in this token three months ago, they could sell it now and become extraordinarily wealthy. Actually, with such thin liquidity (8k/day), one could only realize a few thousand dollars when you dump all your coins into the market. What all those investors did was lock their tokens in the project portal, and watch their account balance grow daily with high interest. 

They could also share the fantastic opportunity for financial freedom and retire early with friends and relatives. When a new investor enters the system, the referrer receives a commission, as does the referrer's referrer. Most continue to reinvest their money, hoping to be richer.

This scam scheme was invented a century ago and remains tremendously effective now. Over the years, I've seen many new investors fall prey to such Ponzi pyramids, lured by the trust in a good friend and their naive greed. I've also witnessed old victims trying to game the scam by joining early and planning to exit with a profit, or MLM leaders who learned the art of get-rich-quick created their own scams and hunted for new innocent money.

In the end, most of us will fall for a scam at least once, gaining experience from the pain. But is it necessary to be suffering for the knowledge that we could learn easily through more convenient ways such as books, movies, or financial courses?

011 -jaken -10/11/2023