Financially Gullible

There are a few situations where we definitely have to think to ourselves "what the fuck?!".

There are definitely a lot of people who are gullible in the world.. sometimes we could call them flat out stupid. Sadly we know two of them, and although that is a low number we felt it was actually not.

Over the last bit of time, I won't say necessarily how long, we've been made aware of two different situations where people we know, some quite well while others more tangentially, have been scammed of their entire life savings. We look at the situation and think to ourselves "what the fuck were you thinking?" and have to take a step back. Some people are just not that smart.

Both of the situations were honestly classic ones. One was a romance scam and the other one was a "get rich quick" scam. It is quite difficult to see both of them happen because usually you just hear about these types of things on the news. Nope, for us they happened to people that we knew and not just secondhand. We've spent time with both of these groups of people, and quite a bit of it at that. Each time though, we shake our heads and think what the hell was going on that made them NOT think this was an absolute scam?

I won't disclose the amounts of money that were lost, but they were definitely significant. It's not like it was 150$ worth of shitcoins they lost but they lost their retirements which is absolutely insane. To think that a few people made off with substantial sums of money, and that they seemingly do that fairly regularly, was pretty wild. Where did the money go? That's the big question for me.

One of the situations really hit home. One of the individuals was convinced that they should exchange their money into Bitcoin and send that Bitcoin to these individuals. The person ended up exchanging their money into SEVERAL Bitcoin, and gave it away. What the actual fuck? Thinking about it now, had they not done the retarded thing and pissed their money away on some bullshit romance scam, they could have exchanged their money into Bitcoin and made extensive gains on that just by doing that simple act. This one really annoyed me, because it's like if you were going to do something so stupid, why not just give ME the Bitcoin? I could hold it for you, and charge you a nominal fee to make sure it stays safe. Nope, they basically threw it out the window.

It's really wild to hear these situations happen to people when you listen to the news or something, but to actually know the people that this happened to really changes things. It hits home for sure, and it also makes me realize how fortunate my wife and I are. Both of us are suspicious of things like this and don't believe these "get rich quick" things or stuff of that nature. We are more of the little-bit-at-a-time people where we invest our time and energy over a while and hope that it ends up paying us well in the future. This doesn't always work out that's for sure, but it certainly can and has for us. We just shake our heads at these poor souls and hope that nobody else we know ends up falling victim to this type of thing..

What about you, do you know of someone who has gotten their (sizable amount of) money stolen in some type of scam? Let me know in the comments!