https://www.wired.com/story/maga-crypto-scammers-donald-trump/
After Donald Trump’s campaign announced it would accept cryptocurrency, the operators of a host of fraudulent websites have sought to hustle his supporters.
I ask myself this every day. Why not just sell some MAGA Jesus trinkets?
When I am feeling more altruistic than greedy, why not toss up a bunch of "PATRIOTS THE COUNTRY NEEDS YOUR HELP TO FIGHT ELECTION FRAUD" and then just donate all the proceeds to campaigns for people against insurrection and fake electors. There's no lie or fraud on that, just exploiting the bias of delusional clowns. I guess "patriots" is a lie, that's about it.
Trump supports aren't real people. Their sentience has been classified as below that of plants. Morals don't apply.
I'm not going to say they're not real or not sentient. But I will absolutely say that they are selfish. They lack the empathy required to understand how things will affect others. They lack the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. They lack the humility required to understand that they could be wrong, and the critical reasoning required to change their views in the face of new evidence.
Almost every conservative I've ever met is either extremely rich or lives in microcosm. Hell, I've got extended family that have never travelled outside of their hometown and anything foreign or different to them is either ridiculed or shunned.
They want a social hierarchy, and they want their place in it preserved. God forbid people get equitable standing.
You know how I know my maga relative lost everything he tried to "invest" in crypto? Because he suddenly STFU about it.
There was a while in 2019(I think) when all the office talk(software firm) was crypto then it just stopped it was glorious.
Anybody who is seriously in the software industry should have realized the crypto was a giant pyramid scheme that they would definitely at the bottom of.
And if one person tells me that it's not fiat one more time they're going to get a slap. Absolutely 100% is fiat shut up.
I actually get crypto as a concept but I really think their can only be one coin of any true value, and right now it's Bitcoin. I think at some point something will come and knock it off the pedistool.
I'm not a get rich quick kinda guy so I never bothered with crypto and have only played around with a little bit of money trading stocks and treated it just like I do gambling (money I will lose, although I did make a bit of money back on GameStop lol).
The worst thing that ever happened to Crypto was the price rising so high. It made idiots billionaires overnight, and then these idiots thought that made them smart. Now they spend all their time going to Blockchain conferences and patting themselves on the back for being so revolutionary when in reality they just got lucky.
crypto was a giant pyramid scheme
Was? I don't agree but I understand when people keep saying it's a pyramid scheme. I don't understand the past tense though.
Absolutely 100% is fiat
I think a key difference is that it's maintained by an open network of computers rather than a state.
It's sold as a money making scheme not as an alternative form of currency. If you just use it as an alternative form of currency to get around some kind of restriction then it's fine but the crypto bros don't use it like that. They think it's going to manifest some kind of will for them. Of course they're being tricked by other people who've already invested. Who themselves were tricked by other people who already invested. It's literally a pyramid scheme. The only way anybody makes money is to get other saps involved.
Yeah, times like 2019 are the best times to buy actually.
When crypto is up, the hype gets out of control and fools rush in to buy. The best time to buy is when crypto is "dead" once again.
(On the other hand bitcoin and proof-of-work is already any obsolete technology... And almost all NFTs are trash... So stick with ETH or whatever instead.)
Of course. Why wouldn't a con artist go after a group that has already self-selected for gullibility?
It's scamming on easy mode
More importantly than being gullible, they often have substantial money and property.
It's hard to see how they still manage to have much money after all the grifters have been picking their pockets.
A lot of these folks have passive income streams that make falling for a four or five digit scam incidental to their way of life.
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if they're not being targeted at all but rather align perfectly with the real target audience: lonely, expendable income, low intelligence, low understanding of tech or finance, aging population.
The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually "okay" people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.
The problem is though, they are dumb. Don't get me wrong or think I'm sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20's after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.
A lot of people haven't learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don't exercise it. My take is that we're expecting people to exercise muscles they've never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate "care" into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their "news station" praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who "hate america" and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you're so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.
We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.
I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.
I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don't make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.
Let's save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it's pure evil.
My personal experience essentially echoes what you've said. I've usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.
The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here's where things go off the rails.
Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he's upset about and figures that if he doesn't understand it, neither does anyone else. He's also a little too proud to admit he doesn't understand it.
This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.
I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.
While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it's not something I've ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.
This group has been the end-product of years of "distillation" in that the people who have issues with other people's identity or politics or can't set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what's left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that's intelligence.
The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.
Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.
This is also something that many people outside of the USA don't understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
49% of the americans
More accurately, 49% of voters. Out of all of the eligible voters in the 2020 election only 66% actually voted. And, that election had the highest turnout in over a century.
So when trying to calculate how many eligible voters voted for Trump in 2020 you'll have to take the statistics above into consideration.
49% of 66% is 32% if my math is correct. 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Sorry for being pedantic but it annoys me when people say that half of America supports Trump when it's just not true.
Well you should subtract out the kids. I'm not going to get irritated about someone under the age of 18 not voting. That's why it should be eligible voters, not Americans.
33%, but yeah. Both are true.
66% of eligible are voting, 33% of eligible are not voting. Of the 66% that did vote, half of those (I used 49%) voted for Trump. Half of the 66% is 33%.
So, of the eligible voters, 33% voted Biden, 33% voted Trump, and 33% didn't vote.
Or, if you want math:
.66 * .49 = .32 or 32%
Edit: I misunderstood the question and gave an off-topic answer. Someone else commented the correct reason: not all Americans are eligible to vote. Children, felons in certain States, etc. Since they didn't/can't vote they're not counted in the "half of America" statistic often quoted.
Half of eligible voters voted for trump, which is about 32% of America in 2020.
Forget empathy. Trumperinas do NOT vote their own interests.
MAGAGAs (make america great and glorious again) are poor and oppressed but vote to lower the taxes on the billionaires and to raise them on themselves, vote to take away public services from themselves, vote to remove the remaining 2 regulations on the megacorps, banks, and big landlords that oppress them.
In a world that made sense everyone in favor of deregulation should be forced to ride Boeing, and leave us, the sane folks, alone.
They got convinced that the interests of the billionaire class align with their own. That's stupidity. You can't fix stupid with empathy.
I don't want empathetic people. I want people to rep their actual material interests, cogently and sincerely.
Right now we have people voting for the "leopards eating faces" party get surprised when their faces get eaten, because the morons wanted to believe they were the leopards too.
Servative trash. No mercy for the servatives. And I am tired of all the moralizing language. Kumba fucking ya. Horseshit. We ain't gonna hug and kiss this shit all better. Morality is a fairy tale and we cannot base a world worth living in on a lie. Morality is a lie on the scale of religion. Morality is what causes people to self-restrict and self-censor. Morality is what prevents the guillotines.
If morality were against the status quo and against the interests of the billionaires, it would have been outlawed!
We all need to rep our material interests. Even one billionaire is a policy failure.
Is it immoral to harm them? Yes, its bad to harm anyone.
Do I give the slightest fuck about them being victims? Hell no.
Why?
Because, to be short about it, my give a fuck is reserved for innocent people. Not for hateful bigots, terrorists, and enemies of the state who want to overthrow our democratic way of life in favor of having a rotten jackolantern as a mentally declining god emperor.
Watching them get fucked in the way they've tried to fuck everyone else give me the same delight as watching gas station robbers be met with a shotgun from the clerk and earn an emergency trip to the surgical suite via the ER.
I dont wish it on them, but I will take delight in it.
https://genius.com/Cheap-perfume-its-okay-to-punch-nazis-lyrics
When we got complacent
In defending our rights
The Nazis changed their name
Now they’re called the alt-right
Its hard because people can use that as an excuse to harm people they pretend is harming them.
But in this case i just couldn't care less. Drain them for every penny they've got. Hold them upside down and beat them like a piñata.
Sigh. Do you want the answer we are supposed to say or the answer we secretly want to say?
This is 'the ends justifies the means' line of thinking. Very unethical. But it can also be very cathartic.
They're probably the same demographic in some ways in that they're right wing and Trump supporters, they're just in the upper echelon of the grifters not the grifted.
I get the feeling, I really do. However, I can't think of many things that would radicalise someone more than losing all their money or being buried under a pile of debt. Being these sorts of types, they'll only go one way. On reflection, I'm sure you recognise the very specific and historically recognisable tinder box.
I mean, it still might not be immoral. They can all get fucked. Just, maybe not in that specific way is all im saying.
A different kind of person is telling you to spare your empathy. Its the same strategy those in the MAGA camp are pulling.
It's not the onion. But now the whole world is the Onion.
I can think of no better irony at this point than The Onion switching directions and becoming a real news outlet.
And future generations wokld look at their archived 80s/90s stories, and think they were real.
And thus the cycle begins anew.
That's brilliant.
You know how once in a blue moon you look at news story that's sounds completely crazy and go "huh"? Like when buzzfeed suddenly started using all their clickbait money to fund good, legitimate journamism?
This would be that.
Or like when all the news outlets were reporting that the Queen had died. AND EVERYBODY BELIEVED THEM!!!
She's not dead. She's still out there. Roaming the streets. Seeking justice among a seedy criminal underbelly, seeking personial closure for the deaths of her parents in an alley when she was a child.
..........wait, I might be thinking of Ted Turner.
Good choice, most are dumb as fuck. If I were evil I would absolutely grift them. They make it so easy!
They're already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.
People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can't determine that an email from "micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com" isn't legit, they're VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king's inheritance.
Being in maga is basically that. If you're wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you're a mark.
Havent thought about the spelling mistakes being a filter, but now that you say it, it does makes sense.
For the same reason they include spelling errors in their emails, it certainly helps when only their dumbest victims get past the initial pitch.
i mean troompa loompas have been getting conned by king con-man conning them for years-- why shouldn't other con-men get a slice of the pie?
Scammers usually try to target 🎯 gullible people like old people. Usually people who don't understand what's going on.
iirc some phone keyboards autosuggest emoji when you type a word, op probably just didn't bother to remove it
I just removed that in my Google Messages app today. And just now in SwiftKey. I guess it came packaged in an update. It's annoying, I never asked for it, just one day it started suggesting them in the autocorrect. Dumb.
Well I wasn't smart enough to say no to working for that god awful place briefly.... I'm certainly not smart enough to spel gud
I'd love to see a study on the religiosity, political affiliation, education, wealth, career, and age of people who get scammed and the types of scams they fell for.
Credulous as well. Conspiracy theory and aliens magazines used to have tons of ads for scams.
It's a plus if trump's supporters are scammed before he can fleece them, let the convicted felons well dry up while other scammers get rich.
It's like the people that unwittingly signed up for recurring donations to Trump's campaign and are suddenly finding their bank accounts drained. Hard to feel sorry for these chumps.
Is there really a difference if the money goes to crypto guys or some GOP PAC? They are both scammers from the word go.
And as scammers prefer to target the most gullible idiots, they already have a perfect target group for their "business" with the MAGA brains.
The money going to crypto guys has less negative impact and might even help some 3rd world north Koreans actually afford food. Any money going to the GOP only brings pain and suffering.
Either way it’s going to organized crime. At least the crypto scammers are unlikely to influence the election!
Yes, crypto guys aren't interested in using the money to help the US become a fascist hellscape.
But see, the truly smart scammer would have a potentially decent coin and name it maga-coin. They're looking for anything except government currency...the super scam, or is it?
