How to Spot a Psychopath

I just saw a Make Money Fast ad on some site or other that promised a "multiple six figure income".

Now there's a phrase to conjure with, eh? And as I write this, Google gives an imposing "about 17,600" results if you search for it.

If you take "multiple" to mean "at least two times", then I suppose it's possible that they're promising you a six-figure income and... another six-figure income.

I prefer to think, though, that all of those pages, in between their misspellings and unpredictable capital letters, are actually offering punters a twelve-figure income.

If the value of "multiple" is three, then there could be an eighteen-figure income going begging!

The Gross Domestic Product of all the nations of the world put together is either about fifty-five trillion or about sixty-five trillion US dollars, depending on how you measure it. That's only 14 figures. So those 17,600 get-rich-quick pages may, I like to think, be promising that you, by yourself, will be making at least one six-hundred-and-fiftieth of the entire world's aggregate gross income. Or around one per cent of the GDP of the USA.

Even if "twelve figures" includes two for the cents, you'd still be doing pretty bleeding well.

Or, of course, the promise might only be 12 figures of income in the worthless currency of some collapsing African dictatorship. An eighteen-figure income in Zimbabwe dollars would only be worth a few tens of thousands of US dollars, as I write this. (They announced 100-trillion-dollar - fifteen-digit - banknotes just the other day, not that they've got much of a way to pay anybody to print them.)

This reminds me of an old scam that promises to make you money via a mystic series of international currency conversions. The actual promise the scammer makes, though, is that he'll turn the $1000 you send him into "One Million In Legal Tender Currency!!", or something similar. Dumb-enough marks presumably don't notice this, or mistake it for some sort of technical term used by the great Jewish Mercantile Conspiracy whose secret wealth-creation system the scammer claims he's making available to honest Christian folk. But, of course, the promise actually means that in return for $US1000, you and your fellow suckers are going to get back one million People's Democratic Socialist Utopia of East Umbopoland Glorified Pfennig-Rands, worth $US7.61.

The idea is that this isn't a scam, see, on account of how the scammer never promised you anything other than a million units of some currency or other. I think this "loophole" is the same as those of a lot of other scams; it's utterly worthless in the eyes of the law, but it sounds vaguely-plausible-enough to stop some of the ripped-off suckers from calling the police.

(The people who fall for this sort of thing usually don't twig to the fact that if there's some rapid sequence of financial transactions that's guaranteed to turn $100 into $110, you could just do it over and over until all of the currency in the world resided in your bank account. If your system guarantees a 10% return and you reinvest the gain every time, then if you start with $100 and run the system only 200 times, you'll have $18,990,527,646.)

I think I know what the real explanation for the "multiple six figure income" thing is, though. It's just that the people running these scams are, if anything, even dumber than the people who fall for them.

(I await with interest the Google ads this post will attract. How many "figures" do you think will be on offer?)