Greed is Not Good
Canadian kid loses $150,000 to Nigerian 419 email scammers.
If you’re not looking to receive something for nothing, you’re not likely to fall prey to a swindler. The greedier you are, the more likely you are to be scammed out of your money. Swindlers are looking to get something for nothing.
As a result, conmen are among the easiest people to con. (I find that fact, and the linked site, as well as this one and others of the genre, highly amusing.)
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NPR’s “This American Life” did a piece on three of the scambaiters sending a scammer on a “safari” hundreds of miles from his home, almost to Darfur, telling him (and, somehow, persuading him) that he’d be able to scam some tens of thousands of dollars from a church.
I felt a bit bad about enjoying listening to it so much; see http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=363 if you’re interested.
And, yeah; about the only scam that I know of that doesn’t depend on the greed of the victim is the Bank Examiner one.