Almost every day I read a topic of someone been scammed out of money. Well, this is a course of life and scams will exist as long as exists human race. What makes me laugh though is methods scammers use lately. Nothing inventive, not even an attempt to make it look legit. "Successful trader will make you 50% in an hour". "BTC refund department". "BTC doubler". And dozens of others so obvious one has to be a newborn baby to fall for. I wouldn't be surprised if soon there will be messages from "BTC Support Department" or anything along these lines. How can anyone sane fall for this?
I received a call from my "bank support line" a while ago. Now these people were real con artists, they had all my data, used correct chat scripts etc. It all sounded so legit I almost missed the moment they asked me for SMS confirmation code, at which point I realized it's a scam. Not being sympathetic to these guys but at least they were highly professional and inventive scammers, unlike those I mentioned above.
Scammers rely on two things to trick people: Greed and speed. They are looking for people who want to take short cuts to wealth and are either too naive or simply too ignorant to understand that they are being tricked. The suspension of logical thinking in return for belief in whatever lies the scammer will tell them is crucial. Many people will have intelligence "blind spots" to overcome or require painful learning experiences before they will be able to spot scams in future. Greed can be another big driver, because again - sometimes people can put aside any rational thought process if they have the idea of obscene riches dangled in front of them. It's worth distinguishing between dumb scams (e.g. bitcoin doublers) and more sophisticated fraudsters though, because high tech scams (e.g. targeted calls or text messages) can sometimes be very convincing and it is how you treat them that is important - by default always go directly to the URL you know or call back the company number listed on their website.