Don't Be a Sucker
A sucker, in American slang, is a person who is easily taken advantage of. We have too many suckers lately. Let me help you to be less of a sucker.
1. The Con
The typical con has four elements: (1) A background Desire that you have that is unsatisfied, (2) a Story that appeals to that desire, (3) an Action the scammer wants you to do, (4) some supposed Connection between the Story and the Action, such that if you believe the Story, you are supposed to do the Action.
The con may be based on universal or near-universal human drives, such as the desire for money or the fear of death. Or it may be tailored to a particular group, say, progressives or incels. The con artist will have observed your type and identified your biases and psychological needs.
The Action is typically something that serves the con artist’s interests, like sending him your credit card number, or joining his cult, or voting for him.
The Connection should divert you from the actual reason the con artist wants you to do the Action with some alternative excuse. If you like the Story enough, you’re meant to relax your critical faculties so that only some vague, perfunctory explanation is needed for why you need to do the Action.
2. Example 1: The Nigerian Prince
Classic example: you get an email allegedly from a Nigerian prince.
Story: There is a rich Nigerian prince who needs to transfer 30 million dollars to the U.S. For some reason, he needs your help to do it, and he wants to pay you $3 million for your help.
Desire: This appeals to the near-universal human desire to get rich for doing nothing.
Action: Give him your bank account details. Or transfer some money to him.
Connection: He needs your bank account details in order to send you the money. Or he needs you to send him some money for bank fees or taxes.
If you like the Story enough, you’re meant to overlook the question of which is more likely: (a) a super-rich person needs you to give him some money so that he can then give you a ton of money, or (b) a scammer wants you to give him some money so he can keep your money. Or maybe it’s sort of like Pascal’s Mugging: you know (b) is vastly more likely, but the dollar amount being offered is so large that you think the expected value calculation goes in favor of sending the Prince the money.
What’s wrong with this:
No one wants to give you a ton of money for doing nothing.
The larger the dollar amount, the less likely it is that the story is true. (That’s also the problem with Pascal’s Mugging.)
(There are other implausibilities, but they are less important because less generalizable. Like that a rich person needs your money in order to give you money. Or that a Prince with a ton of money would pick a random person on the internet whose name he doesn’t even know to entrust with $30 million.)
Point (1) is so obvious that one wonders how anyone could fall for the scam. I think the answer is that people let their desire interfere with their judgment. They want (1) to be false, and that stops them from realistically estimating its probability.
3. Example 2: Religion
Apologies to my Believing readers, but doesn’t religion kind of fit the pattern?