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Comment by United857 | Hacker News Reader

It's unbelievable that showing a car when it's not being awarded doesn't fall under any sort of false advertising law.

Don't worry, they've mostly moved on to selling crypto and NFTs for the most part... I haven't seen a car parked in my local mall for ages, there's a bitcoin ATM parked in that space now.

There's a certain breed of huckster that even if they designated a prize winner, it would be one of their family members. The most important part of managing scams is to expose them, and cite the names involved so that they need to pick a different line of work.

> The most important part of managing scams is to expose them, and cite the names involved so that they need to pick a different line of work.

Or we make these scams illegal. Sending scammers to jail is much more effective than finger wagging.

Cost of a police investigation, prosecution, and then housing them in jail for what? 2 years ?

Public shaming is much cheaper

If you could guarantee someone would go to jail, that would be priceless. Unfortunately I don’t think they would.

You can never guarantee that! Even if the law was able to be that clear-cut about a particular crime, plenty of people would still believe they will get away with it, otherwise there would be no hard crime in the world right?

These people have no shame, much like a lion has no shame when he eats an antelope.

That's instinctual and not an accurate analogy

Still orders of magnitude cheaper than the amount of money scammers con out of the public every year.

In lots of cases, this is demonstrably not true. Sure some scammers might make millions but many make much less. Look at the average cost for prison, the cost of the police and Courts and it can add up to much more.

I'm not saying that you should only jail people if it's cheaper but society cannot afford to incarcerate everybody who commits a crime, not only for the money but the effect it has on ex-cons who can't find work and spiral downwards; families growing up with parents in prison; hardening a soft criminal by jailing them with hard criminals.

Sadly, it is much more complicated than we want to admit and there aren't many good alternatives that I have seen. Tends to be quite polarised "never jail people" or "always jail people".

The government does nothing about the overwhelming majority of small time scammers. It’s left to the civil courts and small claims courts. When the feds do prosecute scams, it’s typically for large dollar value schemes that defraud tens of millions or more.

So we already have that soft on crime reality when it comes to scamming and false advertising. The average person believes the government is far, far more active than it really is in this type of issue. Crime pays and most criminals get away with it.

Hence public naming and shaming

All of the above is fine with me. I don't know why it should just be "either/or".

In most cases if you dig a little they’re already illegal.

But you are assuming what they are doing is illegal. Just because the car isn't winnable might be misleading but that doesn't make it a crime if the defendent claims that they never said that you could win the car, they could also claim that the Ts and Cs describe the real scenario.

Even if it is slightly a grey area, you then have a lawyer fight which costs a ton of cash and then even if found guilty, what are you realistically going to do to someone who pretended that you could win a car to market their timeshares? life in prison at $100K/year to the tax payer?

This is why consumer protection institutions exist (SEC, FTC, FDA, etc.) so individuals don't need to sue.

These sorts of sales tactics should just be illegal and criminal. If your sales pipeline requires exploiting human cognitive failures (ie., "boiler room sales tactics") then you're scamming people. A business exists to provide a service people want, not to scam people into something they dont. The gov. provides limited liability protections to businesses, not to scams.

I think we're far enough into our understanding of human psych now to say "here are the fault lines", if your business principally (, systematically, essentially, ...) uses them to make money, it's illegal.

> life in prison at $100K/year to the tax payer?

I think the point was that these scams wouldn't exist if the laws were better.

> The most important part of managing scams is to expose them,

Yes, because their targets will be reading Hacker News.

The Nigerian Prince scam still works, and every person in the world has heard of it by now.

> and cite the names involved so that they need to pick a different line of work.

I don't think they value their public image half as much as you seem to think. But you're on to something.

What if the alternative line of work they had to pick was cleaning toilets at a federal penitentiary, or stamping license plates, or maybe breaking gravel at a re-socialization camp somewhere in Siberia?

What about Booking.com car rental scams where any issue on your part could make you legally part with your funds?

Plenty of Hacker News readers get scammed. Crypto for example.

Yeah, like those ads with "I am a doctor and I recommend ...", where the speaker is just an actor.

Even in that case it can be argued that the actual quote was written by a real doctor and the actor is simply reading it. This one sounds like a complete scam.

Or worse, a chiropractor.

Doctor of education.

It's pretty easy to be deceptive without needing to be false. A lot of advertising these days just use a mix of clever selective language, vague subjective terms, and omission of important information to avoid directly lying. It's pretty much normalized across all marketing at this point.

To my knowledge an ad doesn't have to correspond to the visual which is why a lot of ads visually sell or imply sex in some way, meanwhile whatever there selling isn't. Clothing is notorious for this. Sticking a car there just catches your eye like an attractive person might to lure you in. It's then up to the passerby to read the details and fine print of what's actually being sold.

I think malls commanding $1500/day for ~200 sq. feet is even more unbelievable.

it does in many countries

This is a car!

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