"I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable..."
https://smartphones.gadgethacks.com/news/trump-mobile-t1-sma...
The terms, updated April 6, state that the deposit is not a binding sales contract. It provides only a "conditional opportunity" to purchase the phone if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it, with all discretion resting with the company. The company "does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase," The Verge and IBTimes UK reported.
So yea... a $100 voucher for a conditional opportunity to purchase one if Trump Mobile ever decides to sell one.
Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
Incidentally, MJ was also hanging out with Epstein.
How did that work in the 80s? Did he spend days and weeks poring through (paper) census data and correlating it with ZIP codes? Did he use VisiCalc on an Apple ][ or Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM PC?
Whatever his other misdeeds, I never got a racist vibe off MJ.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that "hundreds of dollars" is $500, and the risk free rate is 5%, and they hold it for 3 months, then you get $6.25 per victim. Hardly a huge sum. If you factor in credit card processing fees, they might even be losing money on it.
I had some of the details wrong btw, you had to mail in $120 for the chance at 4 tickets, and he only held it for 6-8 weeks. Part of what was so shitty though was that very many of his fans couldn't really afford what was about a months rent but scrapped it together anyways. Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money.
Edit: link from sibling comment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Tour_(The_Jacksons)#Ti...
Your own article contradicts your narrative that Jackson was somehow doing it for evil/greed reasons:
1. The scheme seems to have been cooked up by the promoters, with Jackson himself being against it
2. The "he filtered by zip code" allegation was entirely unsubstantiated, and seemed to be a side effect of making the tickets expensive.
3. Jackson donated his earnings to charity, so the "... for his own profit" claim was also questionable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Tour_(The_Jacksons)#Ti...
There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.
Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.
Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.
Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:
, if I get caught.
Welcome to the grift economy.
Does anyone know who the third person is? Surely it's not Trump himself? I'm guessing Trump just sold the ability to use his likeness and name?
Which is perfectly in line with your comment.
These sorts of scams go on continually in email lists, and vulnerable people just hand over their hard-earned money fist over fist.
Pointing out what's going on makes the family member hate whoever points out the con, rather than the con man. If anything, it strengthens the love of the conman and accelerates the grift.
I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.
Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/07/481137357/the-fractured-repub...
The fact that Americans are politically divided is self-evident from recent elections. But just how we are divided and why it's proved so hard to get past our differences are questions that admit to many answers. And here's an interesting one from the conservative political theorist Yuval Levin. He says, American liberals and conservatives are both inspired by nostalgia from mid-20th-century America, and they are mired in hopeless efforts to go back rather than focus on the future.
...
The striking thing about the baby boomer's cultural dominance over our country for so long is that we view our own past through their eyes. Our idea of the '50s is this kind of simplistic, childish notion of simple families and everything is possible. We see the '60s as a teenager - idealistic, rebellious. In the '70s, we're somewhat maturing, becoming a little cynical. By the '80s we're settled down. In the '90s everything is great. And now, in this century, it seems like we might be over the hill as a country.
Remember the saying: "Fool me once shame ..."
At this point the "faithful" have fully signed up for the cult. While rest of world looks on in horror, the scamming and extraction will only intensify.
For better or worse, it will be interesting to see to what extent his faithful are willing to transfer their loyalty to whoever comes next. I am not seeing any signs of that happening yet. I mostly expect that Trump will maintain an iron grip on loyalty up until the day he drops dead, and then there will be a free-for-all fight for his followers. I do not think Trump can [or will] bless a successor and transfer the reigns.
That’s not a lot of people in general.
It is a lot of people for the king to have scammed.
Its not like anyone cares over the USA right? $TRUMP? $MELANIE? TACO?
For a second I thought you were talking about Biden.
Trump has a level of loyalty from Republican voters that is unprecedented in modern US history. Why is that?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
And the $10 BILLION he is stealing from the IRS by ordering DOJ to settle his lawsuit
Oh and a million dollars PER DAY he steals for each golf weekend
However with his dramatic health decline he is golfing less and less now, so savings?
If you fell for that you deserve to lose your money.
Education wasn't enforced to a big part of our society and it shows.
Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.