What are some notable scams in history that went unnoticed for so long?

Having said that, I don’t conisder it as a scam in itslef

I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don't force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it's not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn't (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).

Religion was needed, but at some point logic and critical thinking should have been enough.

The issue is the wealthiest benefit when the masses don't have the tools to use that. They want people who won't question rules and blindly follow them.

Humans are just animals, we're not born with those abilities, we need to be taught.

So we see education outright cut or forced to focus on rote memorization rather than the process to understand and figure shit out on our own.

We should be past religion as a species, but it's not automatic, we have to continually teach the next generation to think for themselves

Just imagine what could have been done in the last 300 years if every dollar that was donated to churches went to some other cause, or back into the pockets of the masses. There is an immense amount of wealth that is trapped in the collective real estate, bank accounts, etc owned by churches. I'm not even talking about megachurches or the mormon's giant stack of cash, just mom'n'pop little parishes that are everywhere across the US.

If ALL that money was still kicking around in the economy and in the pockets of people to spend on real things, building real businesses, etc...we'd be way better off.

Always makes me sad when I visit my in-laws who live in a particularly bible thumpy area and you go and there are spots there where churches outnumber normal businesses. It seems like it's just a huge drain on the local economy devoting that much money into propping up churches of various kinds...

Religion is used as a scam by many people. It is also used in other ways by other people.

Sometimes I mull over what state we'd be in as a society if instead of celebrating a man's deeds we had been celebrating nature and the environment that hosts us since the beginning.

I can't help but think there would be a lot less damage to the environment and less greed.

BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.

Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing. Otherwise you get everyone giving glib answers that suck like the above.

BTW, I'm reading Smartest Guys In The Room, the book about Enron, you might be interested in looking up that company. They used very complex financial instruments to deceive shareholders and Wall Street and boost their stock price. Bunch of assholes, some of the shit they pulled was obscene.

thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion

things have been like this for a long time, irrespective of the parties. but this has been going too far for the past two decades, especially after the current prime minister started his period.

Obligatory George Carlin clip. https://youtu.be/iouZYYzQEjU

I was gonna write about the fascist aspects of the country, but I wouldn't say that it's something completely unknown; many of my peers are okay with fascism just because there is no centerist alternative, as what we have already seen leftists are not going to be better given the same amount of power.

When it comes to religion, it should have been a personal thing rather than systematically integrating it with each aspect of our lives like how it was initially intended.

Sometime earlier in my life I took a decision of not going to my place of worship; this helped decouple my belief in something bigger that I don't understand, and a cult made by man.

this but unironically

What is the alternative to capitalism?

idk - only 63% of Americans support single-payer healthcare, nearly half of Americans still haven't caught on at least

You’re almost right. Modern medicine needs to synthesize natural compounds to profit fully from them. They can’t just use natural remedies and present them to patients because they can’t patent them.

There's a slight gotcha here:

I'm in Asia and a lot of traditional chinese medicine you can buy is just regular medicine with a marketing disguise hiding the fact. Why yes, this is a box of whatever the fuck extract, very interesting, old northern recipe to cure the shit, let me just check what's written on this paper, and, yep, there it is, it's just Loperamide but with an additive to make it taste like Ginseng. Got it.

Tim Minchin

I worked for a medical clinic years ago.

One doctor was pushing natural hormone therapy.

I asked one of the other doctors. He wouldn’t touch it.

He told me he sees thousands of patients each year. Some number will get cancer, and some number of them will sue him.

If he prescribes a medication, he can defend himself by pointing to the medical studies showing the safety of the medication.

If he prescribes anything natural, there are no studies showing safety, because nobody can patent natural substances. Therefore there isn’t much money to be made, so nobody spends the money to do good studies.

Even if it was a miracle drug, he wouldn’t prescribe it.

Did you hear the one about the homeopathic who tried to commit suicide?

He took a 10X dilution of cyanide.

Lol yeh a surprising amount of people believe in it.

I once trained to work in pharmacies, we had companies present on their products and one of them was selling homeopathic products. One of the other students asked if it actually worked and the rep's response was 'if it didn't do you think people would buy it?' I didn't say anything but I thought to myself yes, there absolutely are people who hand over money for dumb shit that doesn't work lol.

And there are physical therapists who do acupuncture strictly for muscle release without all of the chi stuff.

Acupuncture has actually been shown to help in some cases beyond a placebo effect.

I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.

Trust me bro.

my statutory health insurance (germany) pays for acupuncture. so it seems to be proven that it works so well that they cover the costs for the treatment

It just depends how you define the chi.

One simple way might be “responsiveness”. Chi is present wherever your body is capable of receiving and transmitting information.

Depends on how you define a Ponzi scheme. Personally I define it as pay us money in return for a service, then run with the money or come up with ways to deny that service, once again keeping the money or as much as possible by telling businesses how much they can charge for their services.

If I ran my own company, I would be damned if someone is going to dictate my prices to help their bottom line.

IMHO, that is what has caused health care cost to be untenable for someone who cannot afford health insurance or makes like $3 too much to qualify for the likes of Medicaid.

Ugh my parents both insist on travel insurance. What if you get sick?? Idk, I'll cancel the stuff I can and take the loss on what I can't, for all the travel I've done the amount of times that has happened does not even remotely come close to how much I would have paid each time for travel insurance.

No mom, I'm not going to insure our 2 night stay at the Hilton in (mid sized city). I'm sure it's going to be fine.

Last time I did was for a very very expensive flight across an ocean, just because it was like, 15 dollars on a 2000 flight for a few people. Fine, but everything else we took the risk. (And we did not use it)

Thanks for your input, it helps not make me sound like a conspiracy theorist or anti-biz whack job

Travel insurance is very much required travelling to many countries. Basically the same category as health insurance.

Insuring travel itself is a scam.

Might as well be, the patron still gets screwed

Aka social security...

Unfortunately, like all big business, they don’t care about anything but fleecing the little guy

Maybe whenever you hear those stories about a famous work of art being stolen and later recovered, they've actually just stolen the forgery and the galley just puts up a new fake one.

The robbers then can't sell it because they have a worthless fake and the 'real' one is clearly on display in the gallery, and they can't expose the fraud because then they'd out themselves and go to jail.

The perfect scam!

That's what they do with a lot more paintings that you would think. Not because they don't want the plebs to look at them but because being exposed to the environment would cause irreparable damage to it. So they have experts make recreations and display those.

This isn't really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons

Someone already mentioned religion, yes.

You quite literally described the scam part though, selling false hope

Aquafresh baby!

The garbage flip cap instead of the good old screw on lid

It wasn't McDonald's themselves that were scamming, it's more like the trusted 3rd party they engaged to run the promotion had a bad actor that used his position to fix the game.

They definitely didn't because they count the sleeves that those prize pieces are on.

What really happens is they print 5 million part 1 pieces and like 10 part 2 pieces.

Ah, the Bear Grylls diet.

Wait... Distilled?

Anyone who buys a color laser printer should be aware that the initial cartridges, at least from HP, are not as full as refills, so you will have to replace them fairly soon and it is expensive. That being said, the refills will last a looooong time.

Also, and the main reason why I purchased one, the printer will just work, even if you don't print anything for a couple of weeks, or months even. I went through a couple of inkjets (not the cheapest ones), which would constantly get dried out, a head clogged, etc, before I said "fuck it," and sprung for a laser. My wallet isn't that happy, but it sure is nice not gambling on whether the damn printer will actually print.

y'all need to stop buying ink printers from HP

FTFY

Did the same some years back. Only black and white laser, but this thing just works!

I just assumed the manufacturing process required unicorn blood or something.

You forgot the human trafficking potential. Checkmate

The dollar is the favourite currency for that stuff. Cryptocurrencies are meant to take power away from banks and give it to the people. Sure, the vast majority of the people use them for spsculation, but that doesn't make the technology useless. It's just that people are mostly interested in making as much money as they can. That's a society problem, not cryptocurrency's.

If people paid rent or bought groceries with crypto currency? Sure. It's not like thousands of people without bank access are using coins.

It can have legitimate utility

Sure, sure. But does it and can it actually stay that way?

I haven't seen a functioning example actually out there yet of a planet-burning electricity-wasting math busywork generator that actually does anything it supposedly can do besides become another ruinous and wasteful grift that does more damage to the planet than whatever convenience it supposedly offers to comfort the comforted.

It can have legitimate utility, for example I want to exchange money for international services without a credit card or mailing an envelope of cash/cheque.

It does it infinitely more inefficient, slower and insecure than all other existing alternatives that can do this (and there are a lot of alternatives which doesn't involve blockchain). Which is also why people doesn't use it for this.

Its best use cases are only circumstantial and in every case it wastes a lot of electricity, jacks up the price of video cards, and dumps a lot of extra carbon into the atmosphere. It's like a shitty planet-burning Rube Goldberg machine.

But it's technically not a scam in a pedantic way at the coding level so any scams done with it don't really count and scientific research can totally be done with blockchain and if you ignore the wasted electricity and carbon disaster that cumulatively builds higher and higher with the way blockchain technology actually works because of every individual computer needing to verify proofs with every other computer it is actually not a scam and can do good things and I am sharping the katana of my wit because I can claim that I can not condoning cryptocurrency except I am in a contrarian way

A lot of people actually like it because it really doesn't work the way OP said it did. They are partially correct, but you also get rewarded for perverse incentives. If you double pay your CC, it will actually slightly lower your credit score. If you have a lot of credit cards with no balance, that can also lower your score. The quickest way to buildup credit in the US is to get a card that has a 0% 18 Month introductory interest rate. Pay the minimum balance each month, and save the cash to pay it all off in 17 months. You will accumulate credit like crazy, holding a balance strangely increases your credit (until the balance gets too high or you start missing payments, then it will take a nosedive).

Interest, late fees, holding a balance, a lot of the bad stuff is actually weirdly good for your credit in the US. I mean it makes sense... they want to reward people who are stupid and pay interest, but actually have enough income to keep making payments forever.

When someone from the US remarks about their credit score, it always causes me to raise eyebrows. You can be poor and have a high credit score, it's incredibly common.

In many countries, mine included, there's no credit score system. We recently took out a bigger loan to buy a house and what we had to provide was:

• proof of a steady income (in our case from our employer)
• 3 months of bank account history (to prove that we don't overspend)
• written permission that they can request our data from the central (government operated) loan database

That's it. From these they could tell that we are safe to loan money to because we'll most likely be able to pay it back.

I don't see how a credit score system is essential when you can provide them with the necessary data only when it's needed.

I can’t agree with this more.

Transferring points earned to airlines can also net you some incredible deals on flights as well. I’ve booked several tens of thousands of dollars on business/first class travel over the years at a fraction of the cost. With the addition of free hotel upgrades and car rental upgrades, you can use credit cards to your advantage.

The caveat is that it takes some amount of expendable income to play.

Yes, I'm looking for more specific cases.

There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It’s a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.

I would argue it's the other way around frankly

They probably weren't fully aware because they didn't want to be.

What's the logic behind this take? I would think they'd stop him if they knew.