Can you make something that works? Of course! Will it work as reliably as something made using better processes? Usually not.

Are you mad?!? My wife might read this!!

So the guys on the street that scam tourists are high profile scammers?

is still clunky compared to others.

Wut?

This isn’t even a joke. And I think this might actually happen at some point.

There’s no reason to believe that they’re federal agents if they refuse to show ID.

This is what I don’t understand. What’s then to prevent literally anyone else claiming to be from some other agency to intervene and say they can’t take the person away? And then claim they don’t need to show ID?

I don’t know the reason. I don’t know him personally. Only ever met him over calls.

At my last job we had a sales contact that lived in South Africa (he’s white). At one point a few years ago he dropped off the radar, and we finally heard from him about 6 months later. He had picked up his family and moved to England. Left most of their possessions, abandoned the house, etc. He said things were getting too lawless and felt they had to leave immediately.

I also have a friend who’s from South Africa (also white) who has most of her family back in South Africa, and the stories I hear are chilling. I don’t know this, but it seems like things have been going downhill fast for the past 5 or 6 years now (faster than before).

Even Tom Paris wanted buttons back

I did acknowledge that it’s not exclusive to the US. And I didn’t say “it is”, I said “it feels like”.

FTX, Theranos, Fyre Festival, Enron, Bernie Madoff, Logan Paul’s CrytoZoo, Charles Ponzi (the OG Ponzi scammer), etc.

While scams exist everywhere, the US seems specially suited to embolden people to run scams. At least high profile ones.

It’s a whole hell of a lot harder to rig when your name is everywhere when you win.

This also sounds like a uniquely US problem. Not that there aren’t scammers everywhere, but it feels like it would be more prevalent in the US.