![“to be successful, all a scam needs is a willing victim” “to be successful, all a scam needs is a willing victim”](https://www.nerdwallet.com/assets/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/GettyImages-1172423725.jpg)
It should be noted that anyone can fall for a scam. It’s no coincidence that “Believe me” and “Trust me” are Trump’s most frequent exhortations.
![“to be successful, all a scam needs is a willing victim” “to be successful, all a scam needs is a willing victim”](https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-760w,f_auto,q_auto:best/msnbc/1748000/1748468.jpg)
He figured out the key issues motivating Republican voters right now-job insecurity, unfair trade, illegal immigration and so on-and promises he’ll fix them all. His lead in the primary delegate count speaks to that. There’s no question that Trump is genuinely connecting with voters’ concerns. There is actually a science to the study of con men, and Trump ticks all the boxes. As Maria Konnikova explains in her recent book The Confidence Game, con artists are experts at sizing people up, figuring out what they want, and selling it to them. “I’m capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”) (“I will be changing very rapidly,” Trump told Fox. On a host of issues, from abortion to the flat tax, it’s impossible to know what Trump really thinks because he so dramatically changes his position. The commission also noted that people ages 20 to 49 were more than five times as likely as older people to report losing money on cryptocurrency investment scams.It’s a skill set that defines his political tactics, as well: He figures out exactly what his supporters want to hear, and then disregards any inconvenient facts, logic, or adherence to his own previous statements. PolitiFact found 76% of Trump’s statements to be “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire.” They range from the outrageous (Congress’s budget bill funds ISIS) to the trivial (the “Trump steaks” he offered at a press conference were from a meat company called Bush Brothers). About 20 percent of the money that people reported losing through romance schemes since October was sent in cryptocurrency, the report said.
![“to be successful, all a scam needs is a willing victim” “to be successful, all a scam needs is a willing victim”](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarp/money/scams_fraud/2015-04/1140-victim-of-a-romance-scam-silhouette.jpg)
The Federal Trade Commission cautioned on Monday in the report that fraudsters had used online dating platforms to lure people into cryptocurrency scams. “Don’t send cryptocurrency to Elon Musk,” Mr. He said that investors should be more circumspect when faced with propositions like those concocted by the impersonators of Mr. Grundfest, a professor of law and business at Stanford and a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said in an interview on Monday night that the surge in scams involving cryptocurrency was not at all surprising amid the surging prices. Musk said that cryptocurrency was both “the future of currency” and “a hustle.” In a May 8 appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. He also revealed last week that SpaceX would launch a satellite to the moon next year in exchange for a payment in Dogecoin. Last week, he polled his 55.1 million followers on Twitter on whether Tesla should accept Dogecoin 78 percent of respondents said yes. Musk has similarly sent mixed messages regarding Dogecoin, which was created as a cryptocurrency parody in 2013 and has recently been booming. The spate of fraud cases - a nearly 1,000 percent increase compared with the same period the previous year, the report said - came as the price of Bitcoin and Dogecoin soared toward record highs. The median amount that they lost was $1,900, according to the commission. The commission found that nearly 7,000 people lost a reported $80 million over all from October through March as part of various scams targeting investors in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, a nebulous marketplace that Mr. Musk, the Federal Trade Commission said in a report released on Monday that was meant to draw attention to a spike in cryptocurrency scams. Investors lost $2 million in six months to fraudsters who impersonated Mr. It seemed too good to be true, because it was. The proposition was tantalizing: Handsome returns awaited investors who would be willing to provide an infusion of cryptocurrency to Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, for a moneymaking venture.