How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
An important feature of these scams is to frame success and failure as being entirely in your hands: it’s not the system’s fault that you didn’t achieve success, it’s yours and yours alone, you didn’t want it bad enough. Someone who falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a different grift which looks easier. They’ll do as much as it takes until they strike gold, go bankrupt, or finally understand it’s all a scam. That last one can take a long time to come.
In sum, money making courses don’t need an infinite supply of new chumps when they can keep reeling in the same ones. Offer some discounts and rewards for bringing in new members, and you’ve gone full MLM².
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
Because that entails hard work.
A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over again. Just probably not from the same person selling it.
It's the same as any kind of cult messaging. It's not surprising that the size of a cult designed to exploit people has an upper limit, but it is shocking that the same people will join multiple cults time after time.
(I do know at least two real exampless of this meta-approach to scamming: 1. there are meta content-farms, which hire people and train them to run seemingly-independent content-farm YouTube / TikTok / etc channels; and 2. there are serial Kickstarter/IndieGogo scammers, that follow a loop of forming a new shell company, hiring a new actor to pitch a fake idea, steal people's money for it, and disappearing.)
And, while they're at it, why not constantly seek to acquire the pitch+content from smaller, nascent money-making course creators, and run their content through your existing business engine? Why not be the EA of scams?
It takes capital, time, and work to become “the EA of scams”, at which point you’re inviting further scrutiny on yourself, meaning even more work (and staff, who you’ll have to trust) to not be in hot water with the law.
Scammers, like the people they scam, are mostly after a quick easy buck. You’re posing “why not” questions as if there’re straightforward to accomplish. They’re not. They take effort and risk without a guarantee of success. Most scammers don’t become “the EA of scams” for the same reasons most game companies don’t become EA.
insert a random comment about how "market economy is not a zero-sum game"
Most get-rich-quick schemes are really either “make a few pennies here or there, a few $/€/£ if you are lucky, a few 100 if very lucky” or “make-a-bit-slowly-with-lots-of-effort” or both. The rest not included in that “most” are even more completely bunkum, you'll never make anything unless maybe you join the pyramid and resell the scheme.
There is more easy money to be made selling make-money-easily schemes to those that lack critical thinking, than there is to be made via the schemes themselves. Even if no one you sell the scheme to makes anything, even if they all make a loss in the grand scheme of things, the scheme seller still has some revenue.
A scheme seeming illegal/immoral/both might make some marks easier to catch, as they think they are being clever by knowing that crime does in fact sometimes pay so their guard is further lowered due to confirmation bias on this matter.
I might point to a dozen other parts of the situation as "barely legal scam", but why that part?
And now with the competition basically no one who bought their course can actually make money
This reminds me of an episode of Reply All. They ordered some cheap Rolex rip off, it was even worse than they expected. They found out they were all being sold on shopify and that if you sign up for a new account on shopify you'll fairly quickly start getting spam emails helping you setup a shop of all this crap. Then they'd try to sell you on lessons on how to make it more successful. I forgot if the rabbit hole went deeper.
There's a company engaging in MLM sales paying some news agencies to promote its scheme every day during the news (a subtle sponsor, so to speak; it's on regular TV so SponsorBlock won't help). As my family watched the news from this channel often, I would recognize how it works. It would promote an online course along the lines of "Make Money with a Smartphone" and advertised the course it claimed to cost $249.99 at $2.49 (price may vary, depending on who is the presenter, though the course are the exact same).
The news program is careful not to show the names of the ultimate company offering it, only presenting that this person will be teaching. Sharp-eyed viewer, however, can notice that those adverts intend to direct the prospective "client" to an MLM.
Second, money making courses, don't work. So people tend to buy another and another, to get to the mythical "good" one...