Crypto Scammers Are Targeting Trump’s MAGA Supporters

I can’t even blame them.
- I mean, how do you not fish that pool?
  
  *phish
  
  It's all going to scammers anyway
  
  I ask myself this every day. Why not just sell some MAGA Jesus trinkets?
  When I am feeling more altruistic than greedy, why not toss up a bunch of "PATRIOTS THE COUNTRY NEEDS YOUR HELP TO FIGHT ELECTION FRAUD" and then just donate all the proceeds to campaigns for people against insurrection and fake electors. There's no lie or fraud on that, just exploiting the bias of delusional clowns. I guess "patriots" is a lie, that's about it.
  
  Morals unfortunately.
- Yup.

You know how I know my maga relative lost everything he tried to "invest" in crypto? Because he suddenly STFU about it.
- There was a while in 2019(I think) when all the office talk(software firm) was crypto then it just stopped it was glorious.
  
  It didn't stop, sadly. Everyone just started talking about AI instead.
  
  Anybody who is seriously in the software industry should have realized the crypto was a giant pyramid scheme that they would definitely at the bottom of.
  And if one person tells me that it's not fiat one more time they're going to get a slap. Absolutely 100% is fiat shut up.
  
  Yeah, times like 2019 are the best times to buy actually.
  When crypto is up, the hype gets out of control and fools rush in to buy. The best time to buy is when crypto is "dead" once again.
  (On the other hand bitcoin and proof-of-work is already any obsolete technology... And almost all NFTs are trash... So stick with ETH or whatever instead.)

Of course. Why wouldn't a con artist go after a group that has already self-selected for gullibility?
It's scamming on easy mode
- More importantly than being gullible, they often have substantial money and property.
  
  It's hard to see how they still manage to have much money after all the grifters have been picking their pockets.

Why make it hard on yourself when idiots self-select into an easy target audience?
- TBH I wouldn't be surprised if they're not being targeted at all but rather align perfectly with the real target audience: lonely, expendable income, low intelligence, low understanding of tech or finance, aging population.

Is it immoral to harm a demographic, that consistently harms everyone else?
- The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually "okay" people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.
  The problem is though, they are dumb. Don't get me wrong or think I'm sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20's after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.
  A lot of people haven't learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don't exercise it. My take is that we're expecting people to exercise muscles they've never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate "care" into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their "news station" praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who "hate america" and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you're so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.
  We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.
  I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.
  I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don't make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.
  Let's save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it's pure evil.
  
  My personal experience essentially echoes what you've said. I've usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.
  The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here's where things go off the rails.
  Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he's upset about and figures that if he doesn't understand it, neither does anyone else. He's also a little too proud to admit he doesn't understand it.
  This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.
  
  This is also something that many people outside of the USA don't understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
  
  Forget empathy. Trumperinas do NOT vote their own interests.
  MAGAGAs (make america great and glorious again) are poor and oppressed but vote to lower the taxes on the billionaires and to raise them on themselves, vote to take away public services from themselves, vote to remove the remaining 2 regulations on the megacorps, banks, and big landlords that oppress them.
  In a world that made sense everyone in favor of deregulation should be forced to ride Boeing, and leave us, the sane folks, alone.
  They got convinced that the interests of the billionaire class align with their own. That's stupidity. You can't fix stupid with empathy.
  I don't want empathetic people. I want people to rep their actual material interests, cogently and sincerely.
  Right now we have people voting for the "leopards eating faces" party get surprised when their faces get eaten, because the morons wanted to believe they were the leopards too.
  Servative trash. No mercy for the servatives. And I am tired of all the moralizing language. Kumba fucking ya. Horseshit. We ain't gonna hug and kiss this shit all better. Morality is a fairy tale and we cannot base a world worth living in on a lie. Morality is a lie on the scale of religion. Morality is what causes people to self-restrict and self-censor. Morality is what prevents the guillotines.
  If morality were against the status quo and against the interests of the billionaires, it would have been outlawed!
  We all need to rep our material interests. Even one billionaire is a policy failure.
- Is it immoral to harm them? Yes, its bad to harm anyone.
  Do I give the slightest fuck about them being victims? Hell no.
  Why?
  Because, to be short about it, my give a fuck is reserved for innocent people. Not for hateful bigots, terrorists, and enemies of the state who want to overthrow our democratic way of life in favor of having a rotten jackolantern as a mentally declining god emperor.
  Watching them get fucked in the way they've tried to fuck everyone else give me the same delight as watching gas station robbers be met with a shotgun from the clerk and earn an emergency trip to the surgical suite via the ER.
  I dont wish it on them, but I will take delight in it.
  
  It's not immoral to punch nazis in the face.
- Its hard because people can use that as an excuse to harm people they pretend is harming them.
  But in this case i just couldn't care less. Drain them for every penny they've got. Hold them upside down and beat them like a piñata.
  
  Remember to stop beating them when the coins fall out.
- Sigh. Do you want the answer we are supposed to say or the answer we secretly want to say?
- This is 'the ends justifies the means' line of thinking. Very unethical. But it can also be very cathartic.
- Obviously not. hurting bad people is morally neutral at worst.
- They're probably the same demographic in some ways in that they're right wing and Trump supporters, they're just in the upper echelon of the grifters not the grifted.
- Treading a dangerous line here, but I lean towards no
- I get the feeling, I really do. However, I can't think of many things that would radicalise someone more than losing all their money or being buried under a pile of debt. Being these sorts of types, they'll only go one way. On reflection, I'm sure you recognise the very specific and historically recognisable tinder box.
  I mean, it still might not be immoral. They can all get fucked. Just, maybe not in that specific way is all im saying.
- A different kind of person is telling you to spare your empathy. Its the same strategy those in the MAGA camp are pulling.
- No.

Less money for Trump to scam from them... The Crypto Scammers are doing good for once.

It's not the onion. But now the whole world is the Onion.
I can think of no better irony at this point than The Onion switching directions and becoming a real news outlet.
And future generations wokld look at their archived 80s/90s stories, and think they were real.
And thus the cycle begins anew.
- That's brilliant.
  You know how once in a blue moon you look at news story that's sounds completely crazy and go "huh"? Like when buzzfeed suddenly started using all their clickbait money to fund good, legitimate journamism?
  This would be that.
  
  Or like when all the news outlets were reporting that the Queen had died. AND EVERYBODY BELIEVED THEM!!!
  She's not dead. She's still out there. Roaming the streets. Seeking justice among a seedy criminal underbelly, seeking personial closure for the deaths of her parents in an alley when she was a child.
  ..........wait, I might be thinking of Ted Turner.

Good choice, most are dumb as fuck. If I were evil I would absolutely grift them. They make it so easy!
- They're already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.
  People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can't determine that an email from "micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com" isn't legit, they're VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king's inheritance.
  Being in maga is basically that. If you're wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you're a mark.
  
  Havent thought about the spelling mistakes being a filter, but now that you say it, it does makes sense.
  
  Makes sense. Thieves filtering for easy marks is probably older than writing.

Ya because they already know that they're stupid.

stupid, dumb people, easier target. Who can blame the scammers? :D
- For the same reason they include spelling errors in their emails, it certainly helps when only their dumbest victims get past the initial pitch.
  
  What your telling me the EYE R S (they actually spelled it like that) doesn't want me to give them $10,000 in Apple gift cards? Also I'm not American but who's counting?

The worlds tiniest violin, playing a medley of the worlds saddest songs.

i mean troompa loompas have been getting conned by king con-man conning them for years-- why shouldn't other con-men get a slice of the pie?

Scammers usually try to target 🎯 gullible people like old people. Usually people who don't understand what's going on.
- If you're gonna type out target, why the emoji?
  
  MAGA Supporters would be reading it 🤣
- What a weird ❓ way to use emoji 😁
  
  iirc some phone keyboards autosuggest emoji when you type a word, op probably just didn't bother to remove it
  
  Yeah I don't know why people do that.
- I have had the misfortune of Mixing shows for Newsmax....that is literally their stick
  
  Their shtick?
- I'd love to see a study on the religiosity, political affiliation, education, wealth, career, and age of people who get scammed and the types of scams they fell for.
- Credulous as well. Conspiracy theory and aliens magazines used to have tons of ads for scams.

And donate to a left leaning charity? Chaotic good
- Nah, just targeting the low hanging fruit in a get rich quick scheme. I’m not crying though.

It's a plus if trump's supporters are scammed before he can fleece them, let the convicted felons well dry up while other scammers get rich.

It's like the people that unwittingly signed up for recurring donations to Trump's campaign and are suddenly finding their bank accounts drained. Hard to feel sorry for these chumps.

Not sure whether "let them fight" or "spidermen pointing" meme is more appropriate
- I’d pick spidermen

Is there really a difference if the money goes to crypto guys or some GOP PAC? They are both scammers from the word go.
And as scammers prefer to target the most gullible idiots, they already have a perfect target group for their "business" with the MAGA brains.
- The money going to crypto guys has less negative impact and might even help some 3rd world north Koreans actually afford food. Any money going to the GOP only brings pain and suffering.
- Either way it’s going to organized crime. At least the crypto scammers are unlikely to influence the election!
- Yes, crypto guys aren't interested in using the money to help the US become a fascist hellscape.

Isn't that what those supporters are there for? .... to be scammed
- It's just different scammers now.

Non paywall linky:
https://archive.ph/FC91C

But see, the truly smart scammer would have a potentially decent coin and name it maga-coin. They're looking for anything except government currency...the super scam, or is it?
- Pretty sure there is a Maga coin already.
  
  And you would be right

Grifters of all walks of life have long valued conservative orgs, because they are suckers, and a lot of them have done the hard work of contact lists.

Ah, Big Stupid enabling the Scammer Class: a tale as old as time.

Trump was anti-Bitcoin while president, when his opinion mattered. And now that it's taken off despite him, he's trying to promise crypto users what Biden has already delivered. The SEC just dropped its case against Ethereum.
These are the exact same people who keep leaving their coins on exchanges.
- And he certainly wasn't anti-crypto when it came to pushing his own lazy NFTs.
  
  thanks for reminding me of those. it gave me a laugh to think about people holding those worthless things

Cultists are easy to swindle.

How tragic.

I work in the anti-crypto scam industry. I applaud their efforts. Ethical fuckery.
- That's an industry now? What do you guys do?
  
  Quite a lot, actually. This is really a summation and not comprehensive.
  Evaluate an environment after incident:
  looking for IOCs, determine spread
  Determine backup status and restore if possible
  Return environment to healthy state (AD restore, replication, networking, etc.,)
  Lockdown of security holes
  Advise on best practices going forward
  Decrypt environment if client pays ransom
  etc., etc.
  Depending on the complexity of the environment, this can take a lot of time and effort: much bigger than most internal teams are capable of doing. A client I had in Feb-Mar lasted a total of 3200 hours of work between 12 people on my team across 34 locations to unfuck the situation.
- That’s… an industry?
  
  See my comment in a parallel conversation to this.

People always act like crypto is useless and crypto scams are bad but...
- Thoughts and prayers to the crypto scammers who have to interact with Trump supporters

Fuckem.

Huh, well, I'll allow it.

They'll claim the Deep State got them
- Turns out they were part of the derp state all along

I thought the NFTs from Trump are a scam, or is this another scam?
- I’ll have you know those NFTs were worth millions!!! For like 2 seconds when people paid money for NFTs still
  
  The fact people bought NFTs just proves that crypto bros just buy into hype without understanding the technology.
  \ I knew NFTs were bullshit from the start because I actually took the time to understand how they "worked".

Just be a hypocrite, hide hate behind a thin veneer of love, and you can sell any MAGA dipshit the Brooklyn bridge.
- Why do you think trump started peddling Jesus bullshit last time he ran even though he's not even remotely cristian or religious. He'll shill anything as long as he thinks it'll profit him.

What… like, more?

Oh no! Anyway

The less money on them, the better!

I’ll allow it.

A fool and their money...