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Comment by phonescreen_man | Hacker News Reader

For me the question is, when they lost a little, why go on to lose a lot more? I guess the gamblers galaxy was at play. Logan Paul and his ilk are masters of marketing and manipulation.

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I'm not an expert on this topic, so I'd like to know as well. My own personal theory is that most people, whatever their intelligence level, feel that they are smarter than the average person and their intelligence is part of their sense of identity. When people fall victim to a scam—when they are outwitted—that sense of identity takes a big hit and it's so hard to admit that they were not as smart as they thought they were, that they were wrong about who they thought they were. And so rather than doing the rational thing which would be to admit being deceived and not seeing through it, they double-down, they want to find a way to make the scam work for them, to prove to others, but mostly themselves, that they were not dumb, that they were the smart ones.

Bingo. That's why the friend that points out you've been scammed gets more vitriol than the conman. They've basically, in objective terms, called the mark stupid.

It's just the whole GameStop pump all over again: the people who lost money knew it was a scam, but were hoping they could sell when prices were still high

Unfortunately for them, in this case it was so broken that not even the sales mechanism was functional, so they couldn't even dump the eggs straight out of the gate

I think there's some truth to the whole "It's hard to scam a honest man". At the very least people would wonder whom they're making money off from

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