This is different from my usual articles so I'm not going to add it in any community. It is mostly about real-life events and threats that we may have to deal with. Nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, just some thoughts, perhaps an outburst with what some of us have to deal with, in our daily lives.
Scammers.
We know them from cryptocurrencies. They are always there, in every forum, every telegram, in Twitter and Facebook, they hunt us in our emails. They were there before cryptocurrencies and were constantly looking to scam others.
Scammers pose a serious threat to our finances and it is often they will attack when we are least wary. They will find their prey and wait for a moment of weakness. Scammers are heartless and more than often they have very low intelligence. They haven't succeeded in anything in life, and while some of them managed to have an occupation that can feed them, they know they have very limited skills and they will always be deceptive trying to extract as much money they can with completely unethical means which will be explained below. I am 100% in favor of trying to maximize our profits, but this comes with hard and quality work, not by deceiving others.
In real life, we meet scammers and we don't know it until it is too late. Some of them masquerade under what they call doing their job but are not qualified. Of course, they will do their job very poorly as they are not able to have quality skills. Those I fear most are self-employed "professionals"(workers) like plumbers, painters, builders, basically people that do manual labor but have very low skills. Depending on where you live you the lousy technicians like these I mentioned, will vary between 10-90%. And between them, half are plain scammers. They are hired to perform a job, and they will just do half of what you agreed. It becomes boring having to be above their shoulder for all the hours they work for you because if you leave them alone for just a couple of hours they will make a mess and leave the job unfinished.
Where I live these unskilled professionals reach a huge percentage. 90% probably. Do you have a problem with your sink? Better develop plumber skills on your own to fix this. The same is with every one of these unskilled professionals that can only blind your judgment with their lies. You will hire them for a particular job and they will open two new ones. They will ask for a large percentage of their payment upfront, and it is when you pay them early, they got you by the balls. If you let them loose, they will cause damages on their own and you will have to pay three or four times more what you expected. If you confront them, they will probably just leave everything unfinished, shout and maybe even threaten you. They don't behave like civilized individuals, have no ethics, and can't make a good job of what they do. They are there for the cash grab with minimum effort.
Of course, they will never give a valid receipt to evade taxation and they will always ask for cash. They will keep asking for more too, even for the job that they already agreed making for a certain amount. It doesn't matter to them, they have no honor.
Finding 10% of the honest professionals in any field in my country is very difficult. Of course, the internet doesn't help at all. They fake all the google reviews having friends and family posting 5-star fake reviews, and buy advertising to show their services on the top of searches.
The same is with the car repairs. This is an industry thriving by damaging your car while you only needed an oil change. The only way to have your car properly fixed without additional damage is to have a friend or relative that can take care of it. You will drive your car for an oil change and suddenly the mechanic will appear holding a component from your engine and telling you this needs change.
I notice this problem is becoming huge in countries that are having sudden economic problems. The worst part is that usually, these scammers are total idiots that have barely made it from high school and manage to have a better salary than higher educated people. It is one of the imbalances of society, having to deal with low-life amateurs that are best at convincing you they are top pros in their field.
Of course, the big sharks are elsewhere. In the judicial and the banking system you will find the real scammers thrive. And you will come to a point when you will need a lawyer. It can begin by signing a contract you didn't read well enough. Never do that, if someone rushes you to sign the contract, then you should probably not sign at all. At a point, you may need the advice and services of a lawyer for any reason, not just a contract that you didn't think was going to be binding. A lawyer can help sometimes, but the payments will be increasing over the time of your case. They will keep asking for more finding excuses they have in a textbook. You won't believe it when the cost of the lawyer will be ten times what you thought it would be. They master the art of manipulation and if you bargain with them, then you will certainly lose your case at court.
Each time you will need a different plan to handle these people and each time you will have to get away with the minimum loss possible. It needs balls, it needs to become worse than them and it needs to threaten some of them with legal action. Of course, this doesn't work for lawyers, threatening them is a grave mistake as they are the supposed legal servants.
A broken system that sometimes works, it used to work for me when I was younger and problems were less, it works still for some countries but eventually, it fails everywhere and the result is this. We have to deal with these scammers that masquerade as professionals and try to suck our blood. We will certainly meet many of them, and often we may not realize it early enough.
When growing and increasing your wealth, somehow the scammers multiply around us. I often wonder how the millionaires manage to hold to their riches since they will be targets of thousands of scammers. I am sure that having trusted people around you, helps in all cases. Having a person watching them that you trust will mean the job will be done. Probably lawyers' fees are seen as unavoidable, so a wealthy person has obviously done the calculations already.
I won't have to excuse myself for not mentioning the honest professionals that are skilled and have quality in their work. I didn't mention anything because they are a minority, a small part of businesses where scammers thrive. I don't care if your father or brother is a plumber or a lawyer as most probably they will be dishonest with their purposes and agreements. For my part, I will start always with distrusting any professional and won't even consider trusting that they will get the job done. Won't ever going to pay beforehand and will always ask for the agreement to be given on paper when an agreement is reached.
Getting rich needs skills to manage these threats. Seeing everyone with suspicion is always better for your wallet than trusting strangers. Maybe crashing a few of the obstacles in the way without having legal troubles can also prove a point.
