Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

TLDR - it is implied that a convicted fraudster named Monica Main either coerced an old (and possibly feeble / demented) romance author (Judith McNaught) or stole her identity to fleece wannabe writers out of money. I applaud the author for digging this deep, what an odd scam. It is affinity fraud, except the group is struggling writers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud

View on HN

Oooh I didn't know this had a name. Family members have fallen victim to this several times to con men that came into their churches and pretended to be "one of them" and had a special ponzi or pyramid scheme from God to share. The churchgoers instantly let their guard down, what an easy con. People in a church already have a tendency to believe in things.

That's exactly why many scam emails start off with some religious salutation. If that doesn't put you off you're worth investing some time in because you have self-identified as gullible mark.

Sounds similar to the Nigerian prince emails in principle.

I don't think the issue is that they "have a tendency to believe in things" so much as they are among of group of people who've voluntarily associated on the basis of shared beliefs. Looking through the article identifies other groups like immigrant communities as other popular targets. The hint is in the "affinity" part.

I knew a guy who did this.

Couldn't believe the amount he took from parishioners.

He moved after his caper.

The minute I met him I knew he was a lying, but felt bad for feeling that way. I felt like I was judging him by race.

If you were aware there's an ongoing scam, I hope you reported him to the relevant authorities.

Check out Stan Johnson of the "Prophecy Club" on YouTube and elsewhere. He's been riding various Evangelical trends since the nineties or even the eighties with promotional tie-ins to various enterprises, e.g. prepper food/technology, silver bullion, prophecy videos and conferences. I can't imagine he's making all that much these days and his hybrid physical/online seems small. He got the COVID-19 a couple of times and didn't bother to tell his still-meeting congregation about it until quite late.

He preys on the gullible ... but in some Black Swan event sort of way (e.g. extended regional power outage) his adherents may come out ahead for a short time.

Similar with Jim Bakker[1]. The guy went to prison for fraud and went straight back to televangelism when he got out and sells buckets of freeze-dried food to his parishioners to prepare for the end times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker

I don't know the details, but some years back my Jehovah's Witness uncle and his family got heavily involved in some pyramid selling scheme for some kind of health powder. Your comment makes me wonder if they were introduced to it by another JW - this would be a very powerful hook, as JWs are incapable of even conceiving that other members of the cult might be up to no good.

The most famous recent example is Bernie Madoff who regularly preyed upon other Jewish people and organizations. Not as explicitly religious as some famous Christian hustles (like various forms of prosperity gospel) but definitely an adjacent kind of affinity fraud. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/madoff-...

The weird thing is- it could be a scam that is not actually a scam. If they have somehow acquired the legal right to use the author's name to release books, they don't need to swindle the ghost writers- they would probably be able to actually sell a decent number of books. The victim of the scam would be the author and her publishing company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com