With the social trend of wanting everything “on demand”, ingenious schemes promising immediate fortune without doing anything have proliferated on the Web, filling various niches in the market: cryptocurrencies, dropshippingaffiliate marketing, emailing Where trading. Regardless of the niche chosen, what matters is the coating.
How it works ?
The trap starts with a bait, such as a free e-book, tutorial, or passive income link, to pique the user’s interest. This is followed by an arsenal of persuasive techniques (testimonials, images suggestive of wealth and success, screenshots of bank accounts, countdowns, discounts) with the aim of attracting the Internet user into a funnel which ends buying training, encouraging him to create one himself, then to recruit other learners. The trainer makes good money, but his source of income comes from the sale of these trainings rather than from the business explained in the training.
Toxic Accountability
Why does it work? The trainers use an unstoppable argument based on the empowerment of others. After saying that their system makes it possible to generate money without effort, they encourage the learner to work hard, to put in considerable effort, so as to make them solely responsible for their fate. If all goes well, so much the better, it will be thanks to the “training”, but if nothing happens or if the learner loses money, then it can only be his fault. Because he didn’t buy all the other items of training material, for example.
It is therefore a question of a toxic responsibility making the individual feel guilty and clearing the trainer. This practice exists in many other questionable areas, including multilevel marketing, the secrecy industry, or Law of Attraction, or the prosperity gospel. If you fail to recruit more dealers to sell a product, to attract all that you desire by your thought and to become rich by increasing the tithe, you are solely responsible for it and you can only blame yourself. to yourself.
The laissez-faire
Most of the fault lies with fraudsters, skilled manipulators of the human psyche, but also with the authorities and large technological groups. The latter struggle to clean up the content created by users, but curiously let all this breed of gurus trainers proliferate. The Web still too often resembles, to be mistaken, the Wild West, but, although virtual, it causes very real damage to victims. In addition to the loss of money, it is the psychological and social impact that must be considered. In extreme cases, some individuals follow their gurus all the way, even if it means spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, driven by an ever more elusive hope of wealth.
Why is nobody saying anything?
Many victims do not report the facts because they do not perceive their tangibility. Everything happens online, with little or no recourse and a feeling of abandonment and isolation, alone behind your screen. On the other hand, shame and guilt will cause the victim to blame themselves first and foremost. This is the counterpart of toxic accountability.
Finally, the same phenomenon occurs in online scams as in online sales, namely the long tail in e-commerce: sales of less popular products put together exceed those of popular products. Clearly, the small amounts spent on the scam will be legion, but individuals will realize at some point that it is a scam. Thus, the vast majority of victims will only be for a few tens or, at worst, a few hundred dollars and, despite a strong feeling of annoyance, they will manage to digest it, willy-nilly. Only a minority will go through with the fraud: “free course”, paid articles, paid subscription, options premiumseminar, complete diploma, to culminate with grandiose events.
Who is the victim and how does the fraudster legitimize his actions?
It would be wrong to think that only the naive and uneducated people let themselves be taken in. On the contrary, everyone is a potential victim. Regardless of an individual’s IQ, culture or upbringing, it all comes down to circumstance. It is during crises or traumatic events that the mental and affective balances are destabilized, blurring discernment and reason. The individual, whoever he is, becomes vulnerable and constitutes a prime target for unscrupulous extortionists. Moreover, these frauds flourished during the “shutdown of the economy” linked to COVID-19.
It would also be wrong to think that those responsible for these frauds always do so with malicious intent. In some cases, they think they are doing well, because they find all sorts of justifications legitimizing their actions. This is called Sykes and Matza’s “neutralization theory” in criminology. In particular, there would be a whole arsenal of reasons that the individual can invoke to rationalize rather malevolent behavior.
In doing so, the individual no longer perceives the deleterious impact of his actions and may even come to consider himself as a benefactor. This will comfort him all the more when he sees some (very rare) successful cases, and he will then rush to collect their testimonies as proof to attract other people. Note that these few cases of success are only the expression of the normal law.
While the overwhelming majority of cases (90%) will be had, a very small minority may achieve something, but they are at one extreme (by magnifying the line: 5% success against 5% of ruined people). It should be noted, however, that those who succeed will have paid dearly for success that they would have reaped through other means.
This industry rubs off negatively on all the quality courses and training on the Web as well as on marketing tools. But let’s bet that with more awareness and a systematic removal of this deleterious content, these merchants of dreams too good to be true would finally disappear from the digital landscape.