Hi, NSQ listeners! This week we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes from the NSQ archive.
One of the first episodes featuring Mike and Angela.
We hope you'll enjoy this conversation and we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of the show.
Oh God, I have not been reading those emails carefully.
I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Mike Mon.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, why do people fall for scams?
My brother had just returned from spending the summer in you guessed it, Nigeria.
Oh God. For you or... You can ask that question, I cannot fully answer it.
Yeah, fair. But I think the story that was shared was something like, and you have to do it right now, and if you don't do it right now, whatever.
And so whatever they said, I think I'm sure was entirely plausible.
What I'm not going to do is ask about Bill and whether it's believable that he would be in jail.
Like, for the record, Bill's not in jail and never has been.
Nor to my knowledge has he ever been to Florida.
Oh, wow. There you go. As a brief aside, if you're ever bored, which I know you're not.
But one of the most delightful things that you can ever do is just Google Florida Man, and then see what things up after it, because I mean, I don't know what men in Florida do, but...
I have been educated by the Florida Man meme.
I was like the last person to learn about it, but yeah, Florida Man.
In this case, Bill was not Florida Man.
But yeah, my mom was scammed, and actually, I think she was really embarrassed, honestly.
I think there was something shameful about having fallen for the scam.
But I do know from research that when victims of scams are surveyed, that close to 80% of them will say that they suffered emotionally, when only 25% of them, the numbers are 79 and 24 here, but like 79% of scam victims say they've suffered emotionally, only 24% say they suffered financially.
So there's something strangely...
Yeah, and that's when we just stuff.
But point is, I'm dumb, and I, at the very beginning, engaged with a Nigerian email scam.
So yay for me. One thing that is interesting though, and this is a totally tangential aside, there's this book called Yes Man.
I think they later made a movie about it.
But this guy, Danny Wallace, who lived in London, he was getting bored, his life was getting boring, his friends were worried about him.
So he makes this decision that for six months, he's just going to say yes to literally everything.
So anytime someone says, do you want to go out tonight?
He says yes. Anytime someone offers him whatever, he says yes.
And so he gets, of course, an email about some...
And just trying to put together almost doesn't exist.
Like one study says one thing, another says another.
So I'm going to go with no false.
It's not older people, but it's also not younger people.
It defies any pattern. Yeah, I think it's interesting because I mean, I talked to a few people about scams and was just getting anecdotal research.
And literally every person I talked to about scams, their response was something like, oh, sounds like my dad or, oh, you should talk to my parents, because there's this idea.
Yeah, it does seem like older people are the ones who are just constantly getting taken advantage of.
Right, they're the ones who actually answer unknown phone numbers on their phone.
And then they're like, sure, yes, Billy just three neighbors away from me fell victim to this awful AI scam.
And his wife and daughter have left, go to the doctor.
He has started driving across town where he's going to babysit two of his grandkids.
And he gets a phone call saying that his wife and daughter saw a drug deal going down and the drug dealers kidnapped them.
So he's thinking to himself, well, maybe this is a scam, but then the man on the phone said, we need you to talk to your daughter.
She's having a meltdown.
And then he hears his daughter's voice saying, dad, dad, help me.
I don't know what to do. And then she breaks into sobs.
And then he is 100% convinced that was the voice of his daughter.
Now, granted, he's in an emotional state, but they've taken her to your point earlier.
The financial toll was one thing, but the emotional toll was way bigger.
And there's this new movement in using AI to model the voice.
And so everyone's saying, make sure you have a code word with your family.
So if someone says their kidnapped, it's like, what's the word?
You know what I mean? It's stuff like that, but it's a crazy new trend.
I had not heard of that at all.
Wait, really? This actually happened.
Yeah. Okay, wait. And then eventually he's reunited with his family who was never in trouble.
None of this imperiled physical safety.
He never got the money back, right?
No, of course not. So in that case, his suffering was happening during those eight hours where...
2017, the US seizes a whole shipment of his oil and it's...
do you want to guess what's in it?
You probably don't. Baby oil?
I don't know. Great guess.
That would have been way nicer and would have smelled way better.
Oh God. What was it? Okay, it was a mineral oil with fatty oil that was filled with beef fat, red pepper, and turpentine.
Oh, that sounds terrible.
It just makes you want to roll around in it, doesn't it?
Yeah, or cook something in it.
No. Turpentine? No, the turpentine.
Two out of the three things could have made for a nice casserole.
And then the turpentine could have been there like, and you die at the end.
Yeah, it was because I think that's fatal.
When you said snake oil, it was like, oh right, I heard that it was a real thing.
But I didn't believe things that you just want to be true or that make you feel good about yourself.
Then there's confirmation bias, which is whatever you believe to be true, you selectively filter out your subsequent experiences to confirm it.
I think that plays a role here, but I don't think that early thing that you said, which is like, we wanted to believe it's true.
Like, I don't think that's true for all scams.
But once they get started, I do think for any scam, it's got to be helpful to the scammer that people are in the middle of it going to look for evidence to affirm whatever you got them to believe in the first place, that false thing.
And once you're started, you just get deeper and deeper and keep going.
So I have to believe that a bunch of...
It's incredibly expensive it was to maintain the Eiffel Tower.
And so he used that as a story to go to these scrap dealers in France and tell them that it's so expensive to maintain that we're just selling it all for scrap.
And he sold the Eiffel Tower to this scrap dealer and then left the country with massive bags of cash.
The guy was so embarrassed, like we've talked about, that he didn't go to police.
The same thing happened in the U.S.
again, named George Parker, sold the Brooklyn Bridge several times.
And people would only figure it out when they went to construct toll booths on the bridge.
And they're like, no, no, I bought the Brooklyn Bridge so I can put up these toll booths now.
And of course, no one would let them.
So that's where it con meant.
