Comment by malbs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malbs | Hacker News Reader

Completely off topic, but rather than watch the video on autoblog.com I followed the link direct to youtube, but I got distracted by the "mom's reaction to 1250whp twin turbo" on the right hand side "Related Videos" section, Just a quick peek right, can't hurt!

But then I got curious about this video poster, RobertHimler, and looked at some of his other his videos, and them stumbled across his Australian girlfriend Amy Sangster, and her success in foreign exchange trading, and his 17 lamborghinis, and they're both 22 years old and retired from the rat race and HOLY SHIT BALLS THESE PEOPLE HAVE AMAZING LIFESTYLEZ YO

And he is an amazing web developer who has created 8 different sites and a photo app that rivals flickr and instagram, and he's been programming since he was 8 years old, and a self-made multi-bazillionaire

And now he's selling an e-book on the internet how you too can have the amazing lifestyle and own crazy expensive sports cars and attractive partners, and it just stinks of some sort of super scam, but wow, what a story, and it kept me entertained to do back ground hunting on the two of them for 15 minutes, and it was an unexpected trip, so thanks.

It's an engaging white collar 411 scam (without the murder). How do people actually fall for this stuff?

It's an interesting question. Interestingly enough if you can get past the chicken and egg stage, it would appear as though it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy - ie, selling the information on how you got rich might eventually get you rich.

I remember sitting through a seminar which was touted as a sober investment discussion but turned out to be a get-rich-quick scheme. The guy had all the same things - photos of him in Ferraris, awesome looking girlfriend despite him being a very plain, overweight dude, and pictures of his amazing houses.

I was thinking at the time how easy it would be to make a slideshow like that, throw in some very generic advice and sell a couple of hundred 'kits' a night at a few thousand a pop. You could easily end up with said Ferrari and house if you could keep it rolling for a year or so.

That is, if you could live with your conciensce.

You wouldn't be the first person being skeptical of this whole thing:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/robert-himler/internet-fraud/rob...

http://vecinuca.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/robert-himler-and-a...

http://vecinuca.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/robert-himler-and-a...

Now I don't know about either of them until you mentioned your post but all I know is that https://www.google.com/search?q=drew+houston+scam or https://www.google.com/search?q=alexis+ohanian+scam do not return nearly as many dedicated blog posts as https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+himler+scam or https://www.google.com/search?q=amy+sangster+scam

A couple more clicks and I came across https://twitter.com/socialmediatwip defending http://amysangsterscam.com/ and promoting http://forex-ultrasonic-robot.blogspot.com/

yeah, I discovered all those links, + some more regarding their forex company, and a couple of other partners in crime who'se names I won't mention.

I particular enjoyed the ripoffreport one, where a random internet dude got on and defended Mr Himler with huge walls of text including bold and italic formatting. They seemed to take a lot of care for someone who had no connection at all! Colour me skeptical!

It made for a great Friday afternoon of reading, all that was missing was a beer in hand, but I have since taken care of that missing beer problem.

oh damn, I actually followed those links to Drew Houston and Alexis Ohanian expecting even more exciting scammer reads, but received a history lesson on the founders of dropbox and reddit instead!

How to get rich quick: write a book about how to get rich quick

Seriously, if you're independently wealthy and retired at twenty-two, why are you selling an e-book? That should immediately throw up flags.

I thought at first you were talking about the beer can dude actually being a billionaire with 17 lamborghinis! It would be hard to imagine somebody who actually owned those cars to spend so much energy duplicating the engine sound with a beer can.

Well, 17 lamborghinis was an exaggeration, he did seem to have a number of them, an excessive number, coming from someone who drives a commodore, I was jealous!

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