Why do we fall for these schemes over, and over, and over again?
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Great article by Ron Chernow in the New Yorker titled Madoff And His Models.
Certainly Madoff is today's news, but as a society we've seen this film before, and many times. The scheme is named after Charles Ponzi's exploits in the 1920s, but I doubt that he was the first to perpetrate it. Ivar Krueger, a Swedish financier dubbed the "Match King" was a legitimate businessman that turned to fraud because he could not sustain the returns he promised his investors. Even as recently January of 2009, the Satyam Computer Services affair shows that the basic scheme lives on, and on, and on.
Yes, there has been more awareness, more laws, more audits, more regulation, and more hand wringing and anguish since Ponzi did his thing in the 1920s. It does not seemed to have helped any, has it? And apart from the Madoff, Ponzi, and Krueger, the Canadian Lottery letters and the Nigerian 419 e-mails persist after all these many years only because they work!
Why do we fall for these schemes? Fraudsters do this because people are willing to be defrauded, either because of their own greed, blind trust, ignorance, or innocence.