Why Scams Succeed

CF: Do many of these scams succeed? If so, why?

GM: It’s basically just a law of averages. If I send out and attack 1 million people and I get 1%, that’s 10,000 people who have fallen for my trick and probably the odds are lower than that. There are close to 200 million people who file tax returns in the United States each year. So the pool of opportunity is really vast.

The goal of of these types of scams is money. And when you think about the human psyche … there’s fear and there’s greed. These are two of the most powerful human emotions. So scammers look to exploit and take advantage of your fear and greed. There are the fear-based scams where you owe back taxes and “we’re going to garnish your wages. We’re going to do bad things to you.” And then greed is kind of the more insidious one because when you’re feeling greedy, you bring your guard down. So greed-based scams are like, “Hey, we’ve just given you your refund and it turns out there was an error. We need to fix it. We’re on your side. We’re your friend.”

Combating those emotions is a really tough thing to do. And this is why scams get worse every year. A lot of people are making a lot of money doing this.