The problem with the naive kind is not only the persistence, but often the willful ignorance of established patterns to failure, and the arrogance of insistence that no this is not going to go down poorly, and then it does. I have seen so many people give up dealing with it over the years. I have friends that have fully withdrawn into their shells and never come to a place like SN anymore, because they have burned out on dealing with scammers.

That's the real flipside of this. We preach don't trust, verify, but Brandolini's law makes it impossible with scammers because the scams pop up faster than you can debunk the claims. Like mushrooms on hot shit in the batcave. The guiding principle for me has also become: do you need it? No? then don't bother.

But then I see entire irl communities being taken over by scammers, much like the story in #1553722, but I saw that happen in front of my eyes. I saw the devastation. And the people that pitched it were truly believing that they could double their money by "fucking youtube" by watching ads through an app. They'd defend it with all their might when you brought it up. "Show me evidence that this isn't true".

And that is why I truly hate scammers. Because personally, I didn't invest blood, sweat and tears in Bitcoin for people to trade in one set of scammers for another set. We can be resigned and say "oh there's always scams". Which is true. But every one we can prevent or at least mute here on SN will (a) make SN safer, and (b) make scamming costlier.