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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

She was paying for his divorce with jolie. She got 770k euros from her own divorce. Not exactly a poor person

A fool and her money are easily parted. You can have sympathy for her while admitting that she s a fool. Not even the first or second one.

Moral of the story is "don't be a fool" because there is no chance that scammers will disappeared

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No, the moral of the story is that technology is an exponentially-growing force multiplier for scammers.

Back in the hunter-gatherer days, you could be a fool and still survive by relying on your kinship group to protect you and take care of you. They would find ways to let you contribute to the group without needing to be highly intelligent and skillful.

Now we are living in a techno-jungle swarming with parasites and predators. Let your guard down for even a moment and you could lose everything. Oh, and when the cognitive decline that comes with age catches up to you? You might as well walk out onto the virtual ice floe and unplug yourself from the internet.

Probably true that we are all vulnerable to scams in one way or another, especially as we age. Some of us has more mockable vulnerability, but one way or another it's just a bug in human software.

Even if we aren't vulnerable to scams, we may be vulnerable to falling for false rumors, fake news, myths, or just things that sounds true but turn out to be false.

"Don't be a fool" isn't really much of a lesson, but it is useful to know there are fake Brad Pitt milling around potentially preying on vulnerable women.

I don't see how that validates the response of the public mocking and harassing them.

Unfortunately for her the mocking is to teach other fools not to be one!

Some people are the shipwrecks on the rocks that help others navigate.

Yeah very commonly people say, "I have identified this as a scam but given that other victims weren't mocked relentlessly enough, I shall part with my money." /s

I think you know that's not what the comment is saying. They're saying people who fall victim to these scams would be less likely to talk about it, knowing they'll be the Internet's lolcow for a day. That hurts everyone, because now a scam is getting less coverage, leading to more people falling for it.

Has nothing to do with recognizing it as a scam in the moment it's happening. They're talking about what comes after falling for the scam.

That's a nonsense argument. Mockery obviously makes people LESS likely to talk about their victimization.

What you're actually trying to say is, "mockery amplifies the signal to get in front of more people's eyes" and my counter to that is: it doesn't need to. The article itself does a perfectly fine job communicating what's going on without making mockery. You're just choosing to layer mockery on top of it for, as far as I can tell, net negative effect.

It's the human condition to teach each other via positive and negative reinforcement.

If she didn't come forward publicly her story would've via the human telephone game. As well fabricated stories on this topic will and are created. So the mob is mocking fiction but in the end in a valuable societal manner to teach the fools.

I don't even know what argument you're trying to make here.

We don't need to spread the story because it'd do it by human telephone? We do, and it needs mockery? The stories are fake and the mob is mocking a fake story?

How about: Don't be a bully to people on the Internet?

Human telephone game ... you tell your story to one person that person tells it to another and to another and so on. Then someone writes about it and her story is out. She didn't have to stand up in public per say and tell her story it gets out anyway. Her story and the mockery from it teaches other fools not to be such.

I, myself am not one to ever bully a person or an entity online. It's just not good energy to put out there.

As for my belief that not all of what we see on the Internet is real (in the media too).. i won't go down that rabbit hole. Your point is do not bully people online whether they are really real people or not.

I would think that public mocking of scam victims would just encourage them to keep quiet about the crime.

Everyone is a fool in some aspect of life. This person was bad with money and fraud, but maybe she is or was an extremely talented artist. Maybe you understand money and fraud, but are otherwise talentless. Neither of you are fools.

Wrecking your life is substantially worse than not being a good artist.

Most people never had €830k to begin with - are their lives already wrecked?

The lack of morality in the parent post discourages me.

> She got 770k euros from her own divorce.

The ex husband must be laughing his ass off at this!

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