I once knew someone who was in deep trouble with a gambling debt. Then his brother won the lottery, and gave him the money to pay off his debts, and enough money to find a way to find a decent career so he wouldn’t get in more trouble.
The guy ended up buying a restaurant but didn’t hire any employees. Instead, he decided he and his wife would work there (neither had any cooking training or entrepreneurship education). It was in an industrial area in a strip plaza, all he had to do was like pizza slices for takeout or something and it would’ve been fine. Instead he wanted it to be a restaurant, but it was a mess.
Needless to say it started failing almost immediately. He hired an illegal immigrant and paid her unfairly, cash under the table. His wife was also severely obese and couldn’t stand for long, so he ended up getting his brother and sister in law to work at this dog shit place for free (yeah, the same guy who gave him the money in the first place).
Then he made a deal with the mafia to close off a back section of the restaurant for them to use for organizing gambling. No one was ever allowed in there, it was basically just their private room.
I don’t even know if the place is still open anymore, or what happened after that. I lost all ties to that place long ago.
Edit: I just looked it up and it’s closed, unsurprisingly. I’m not sure if he was caught or ran out of money. It could really be 50/50. The guy was so connected, he got a major newspaper to write a piece about the restaurant back when it first opened. Still blows my mind.
I know I’ll probably get dogpiled for saying this, but I’ll say it anyway. It makes me really sad to see these things because they’re targeted to people who aren’t “willingly stupid”. Learning disabled and the elderly primarily. I’ve also seen foreign teenagers who grew up without technology in very corrupt government systems fall for similar messages.
It really breaks my heart. We should be protecting these people, but there’s so many comments here blaming them.
“Stupid people” aren’t the problem here, the scammers taking advantage of the most vulnerable populations are.