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I think it's worse than that. Even what people think of as a "legit business" like Amazon and Walmart are scamming a significant percentage of their customers.

Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.

The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.

It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious. AI is going to be revolutionary for scammers. We're rapidly moving past call-bots that are good enough to bilk seniors. Imagine a MLM where the thousands of other suckers lining up to do the same thing are effectively invisible to the mark. That small fee the mark pays will seem like an unusual and extraordinary exception, but a necessary one. Suspicions will be allayed slickly, deadlines will be adjusted to add just the right amount of pressure, and the payoff will always be tantalizingly close. Every mark's online presence will be scraped so they can receive a custom tailored experience designed to press all their buttons.

It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?

We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.

Yep. And it's only going to get worse as the population of wealthy older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment continues to grow. They're the perfect target for online scams: still able to use computers and in control of substantial assets but also lonely and gullible.

>how much of the actual economy is above-board business

Illegal drugs are absolutely a single digit percentage of the economy.

>I'm starting to think a very large chunk of the internet (and national economy) basically runs on scamming people.

It's called convergence. As we import people from India and China en masse, we become a little bit more like them.

With no corresponding reverse flow, they remain unchanged, so the process is stable for as long as we allow it to be (and for as long as the cultural arbitrage exists.)

Land of the lie, home of the scam, the worst of which is the red team / blue team garbage you people devour everyday designed by the political elite to give you a distinction without a difference and keep you distracted and in conflict with your fellows.

A prohibited product and a scam are not the same thing, like, at all. Putting both of them together is disingenuous.

Dead Internet theory.

Fraud has been the fastest growing sector for about 20 years now. Much of this is movement of previously simply scammy products into actual scams. The kinds of things that you used to find advertised on late night television are now supercharged by Amazon availability, by ads that can directly target likely marks, and by the terrible state of reviews; it's so easy to manipulate that there's effectively zero correlation between quality and reviews on any major site, and paradoxically the sites actually selling products are the least awful at this.

This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.

And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.

It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.

I had the same exact experience in high school. I think I found the ad online and the interview was at the mall. I knew something was off but couldn’t pin it down exactly at the time (now I know it was probably some MLM type scam). I stuck around and was “interviewed” but didn’t accept anything. Later they called my house and my parents told them I wasn’t interested.

> and a good number of people immediately left.

"If any of you think you're too good to sell perfume in a parking lot, leave now."

I hadn't even considered I might be too good to sell perfume in a parking lot until that moment, but it turned out that I was.

My last 4 jobs were all LinkedIn; but the last was 8y ago. They were all Apply Now.

I clicked. Provided a few things. Had an interview within a few days and the offer a day or two later. It was absolutely lovely compared to Monster or ZipRecuiter or CareerBuilder or whatever was popular at the time.

Now the only Apply Now links appear to be resume harvesters or agencies reposting other open reqs.

I got interviews and two jobs via LinkedIn, in Europe.

Some "AI" HR tools will check your CV matches the online social media profile.

It is lame, but some people treat perspective employees as a fungible service. =3

One place laid everyone off, in the job hunt after that I found job ads from the same company, for my own role, for enough less than I earned that the ad had to have been many years out of date.

As everyone was laid off, nobody inside to contact. Messaged the (by this point former) CTO on LinkedIn, was a surprise to him too.

Many places post job ads, but they don't really look for anyone, they just need CVs in case they'll need someone in the future. Waste of time.

Also people use the appeal to authority trick, "I'm a doctor, thanks for tuning in to my show, The Statin Scam" and... buy my b.s. supplement that does nothing"

I honestly don't think so, at least not in the scammy way most people think.

Most of them are simply deprioritized and situationally used. Most companies with more than 50 employees (and less than 5,000 let's say) want something more like a pipeline. They often have some interchangeable work and might decide to hire 3 SWEs. So they interview a pool and eventually fill the 3 roles. But why take down the listing? When they post they get 1,000 resumes instantly, but every week they get 100 new ones. So if they decide to hire again they just cull the top 50 most recent and take a look. You could be the best person in the world but if you are resume 51, you are ignored.

AI (on both sides) and hiring manager laziness has made lucky timing the most important factor for any hiring chance.

Run by scammers to collect personal data, asses wealth, get address...

If job boards were in the business of matching job seekers to open positions, yes.

That’s not how they make money though. They make money by selling listings.

Same mistake that people make about journalism (including journalists). The amount of news reported is a function of ads sold.

It no longer works that way. Scumminess is now directly defined by how much money you don't have. The more money you have, the less scummy you are.