Chitchat  on  Swindlers

Before the age of the World-Wide-Web, research found that most people can detect only 54% of deceptions they encountered. In the age of the Web, when all kinds of people (including professional swindlers) can peddle increasingly sophisticated lies online, the probability of an average person to detect deceptions is likely far below 50% -- a success rate worse than flipping a coin!

We build this website to learn why people are so easily deceived. We hope that this knowledge can reduce our chance of falling victim to swindlers..

As one alleged swindler who proclaimed "I'd be happy if someone called me a swindler" said:

"So, in the existing environment we simply cannot escape swindlers unless you are not alive. We need to calm our own heart and strengthen our own mind. If we are deceived, develop the habit of investigating our own personal weaknesses to find the cause. We live in a world where scams are everywhere (the law of the jungle). Apart from making ourselves stronger and trying our best from getting deceived, there is no other way to escape scams. If we only scold the swindler after we are cheated and do not see our own weaknesses as a reason for being deceived, if we do not "reflect" and "improve", we will always be a loser in this world where the strong live."

As explained by another alleged swindler, there is another factor to consider -- shortcomings of our mind:

"Swindlers" are not limited to cheating money. Many "swindlers" deceive people's feelings. Some "swindlers" dupe people into wrong perception of facts. For example, some cults have successfully persuaded their followers to worship and follow their leader unconditionally (including dying for the leader). Many people consider them to be a kind of "swindlers".

And the most important trick of swindlers is to generate illusion in the mind of the victims.  For example, even though the cult leader is cruel, but the followers still believe that the leader has magnificent personality -- they may believe that the leader's abnormal behavior is to bring bad people to justice.

On the face of it, this alleged swindler is right. But the deeper consideration is:  How to "reflect"?  How to "improve"?  How to "making ourselves stronger and trying our best from getting deceived"? How to remove shortcomings of our mind? These are topics that need to be investigated further.

First, we need to distinguish between "facts" and "illusions" created by swindlers. Unfortunately, we are not born with this ability, but have to work hard to acquire this skill (there are almost no free lunches in the world). Here are some of the basic learning guidelines:

(1) Do our best to know the tricks of the "swindlers" (Question: How many of us had spent time to study those tricks? The likely answer is "very few".);

(2) Improve our logic, reasoning and analysis skills (note: most people have never objectively evaluated their abilities and often overestimate them; please watch the video below);

(3) Increase our knowledge base so that we can consider more comprehensive factors;

(4) Reduce our brain's information processing flaws and correct our personality weaknesses, including greed, anger, and arrogance.

But many people think they can spot swindlers and expose their lies with little efforts. In many situations they only rely on intuition and simple observations (click on this webpage "How Good Is Our Intuition?" for an estimate of our intuition ability, and wrong intuition can affect our reasoning and analysis). However, there are very few free things in this world -- and those things don't include the ability to distinguish between "facts" and "illusion." Those who believe in "little efforts" are likely being deceived by themselves. Note: We are good swindlers who had successfully deceived ourselves multiple times  -- one of the shortcomings of our mind !  Watch the video below:

Many people also mistakenly believe that only dumb people are gullible, and that they cannot be easily deceived because they are smart. But even highly educated and successful people can be deceived. In 2022, the founder of a health technology company, Theranos, was convicted of defrauding investors. These investors were accomplished businesspersons with large collection of portfolio companies. Business enterprises that partnered with Theranos were also deceived, including national drug store chain Walgreens and major supermarket chain Safeway. Further, member of the board of Theranos were duped by the founder. The board members consisted of CEO of major corporations, lawyers, medical doctors, former Secretary of Defense, former Secretary of State (Henry Kissinger), etc. A few months before the fraud was exposed, the founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was elected a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows at age 31. She was recognized by Forbes as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire at age 30. Holmes got jail time and started her prison term in 2023.

If you want to know more details about these guidelines, you can  read this page.

For those who are wondering why we are so easily deceived by swindlers, you can  read this page for one of the reasons.