“Social engineering techniques have been popular almost since Graham invented the telephone” - i wrote, when i started to summarize my thoughts in this topic, but then I realized, that much earlier Devil fooled Eve by convincing him to eat an apple in Genesis, and even Steve Jobs his majesty couldn’t avoid this flick.
Nowadays fraudsters do not want us to eat apple, but to jeopardize our money. In Hungary, the newest scam is about the following: you receive a phone call from unknown number about possible winning of 6 million HUF (roughly 20.000 EUR), if you read out a freshly bought prepaid phone card’s number over the phone. That mentioned plastic item costs maybe like 3.000 or 5.000 HUF, and even if I got cheated – thinks the victim – it’s not much compared to the opportunity to change my life (“bigger good” as John Stuart Mill would say) and push millions into my pocket.
It’s an obvious fraud from an external point of view, and you immediately recognize it, but when you are in, maybe it’s not that trivial.
I believe, that options to earning money legally and planned, if you have none at the moment, is quite limited: you work hard, or you have an idea, and after you work hard. People tend to forget about St. Benedict’s regula’s most important teaching: ora et labora. We as humans usually do not pray and work, but pray (optionally), and hope to get lucky.
