One of the more interesting stories that has hit the global news pages today (2 November 2020) is the story of a doctor in India who is suing two men who fleeced him of a seven million rupees (around US93,000) for “Aladdin’s Lamp. It seems that the men promised him that they could control spirits that would make him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams and when it didn’t happen, he sued. The story has received quite a bit of traction and details can be found at:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/2/indian-doctor-duped-into-buying-aladdins-lamp-for-93000
I know it’s wrong to say this but I hope that the court
acquits the scam artist because not to do so would be to empower scam artist
though out the world. It would imply that people are merely dupes who are
powerless in the face of a convincing story.
If you look at the basic facts of the case, you’ll see that
the main fault lies with the doctor, who got carried away with his greed. How
does a man, educated enough to be able to get people to trust him with their
medical issues, fall for a story about how a folk tale that had become a Disney
movie would be able to give him real wealth?
The Cartoon in Blue is NOT a qualified financial advisor
Copyright © Disney. Taken from momjunction.com
Having been in liquidations for half a decade, I’ve had the
experience of encountering sad, scam cases. Scams are particularly sad and
distressing when they involve a good number of elderly people losing their life
savings.
What is even sadder is the fact that a good number of these
elderly folk often “invested” in whatever scam was involved because they were
persuaded to do so by a relative, or someone they wanted to help. That someone
is unfortunately, a rational and educated person who lost all sense of reality
when presented with some numbers exciting numbers. The old adage of “If it
sounds too good to be true, it probably is because it is,” should apply when
presented with numbers that are exceedingly large.
I remember a potential case coming to see my liquidator, who
wasn’t in. During the course of this interview, I asked the man for his
profession (teacher) and whether the financial vehicle he was investing in was
regulated by the authorities. He admitted that he knew that it wasn’t but the
story he was being told sounded good. After getting him to repeat himself a few
times, he admitted, “That sounds bad now that I’m saying it for a second time.”
Yes, scam artists are wrong to scam. However, if you’re a
reasonably educated working professional and you allow your greed to get the
better of you, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
It’s the same thing when it comes to medication. As awful as
I think Donald Trump is for promoting bleach as a cure for Covid-19, I don’t
think he can be blamed when people die from taking bleach. Surely, you’d have
the ability to read the label and not take it?
Conmen don’t hold a gun to your head to get you to invest.
What they do is to appeal to your sense of greed or your fear of missing out.
Once you throw caution to the wind, you may even do the con job and recruit
more people to the cause.
It is morally wrong to scam and it is rightfully illegal.
However, there should be an onus on people, especially those who have some form
of education and in many cases, years of professional experience. A person with
education and professional experience should be able to apply common sense,
rationality and if unsure, have the means of checking. Unfortunately, many
people who fall for scams to the extent that they encourage others to join the
scam are precisely the type of people who become the scams biggest supporters.
Falling for an obvious scam (things like let me have sex with
you get ghost out of your vagina or banks borrow money from me at a higher
interest rate than what they pay normal depositors) means that you have not
applied brains. If you took away the right of people with brains to be victims
of obvious scams, we’d have a lot less of them.
Let’s go back to the good doctor in question. It’s this
simple, there is no scientific evidence to show that genies exist and if
someone shows you a genie, don’t offer to buy it. If the guy really had a genie
that could make him or her wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, why
would they even contemplate selling it to you? Would you trust this man with
your medical issues if he could fall for this?
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