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Comment by HankB99 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this explains the temporary signs I see on busy street corners proclaiming something like "Make $$$ working from home." (Or are these recruiters looking for telephone support help?)

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Cleaning those things off of streetcorners is a simple and rewarding way to beautify your city. Also a source of stiff wire that comes in handy for crafts where a coat-hanger isn't quite beefy enough. (I make all sorts of hooks and hangers and brackets out of it.)

But... those signs are vital! People call in, get vetted, then are given a special set of sunglasses, that lets them see... Them!

Are you nuts? Are you trying to kill us all? Or.. are you one of Them?

Ha, it's good to encounter a fellow trash-wire-upcycler. I mostly use it for simple hooks, how do you use it for brackets?

I've used this technique for a number of things. Some further ideas are in the comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa8IrMWXtYc

Ah, I like that. The wire I get from old lawn signs is steel though, not quite so easy to hand-form around sharp corners like that. I use a steel pipe as a guide to bend it into S-hooks. Trying to match the dimension of a rectangular object would be tricky.

I followed a few of those in a previous life and they are always MLM schemes.

I have family members who are always getting themselves involved in MLMs, and for the longest time, it was always some health supplement, or training course, or deregulated energy savings thing.

In more recent years, I’ve become convinced that some of the current MLMs (especially the crypto variety) are fronts for something shadier, and/or are pure scams using the MLM format to court the crowd that’s already into that stuff. Increasingly they can’t really explain what the actual product is, and it’s clear that they’re just greed/desperation traps.

The aha moment for me was realizing there's a set of scammers who scam other scammers by selling them the ability to scam marks.

It's why so many spam campaigns are completely broken (no link, nothing to even possibly send anyone any money) because the money was made when the spam gun was sold to someone, and they have no idea how to use it.

The 'Octopus: Sam Israel' book really highlights this -- conmen seem to be more susceptible to being conned than the general public.

Not just conmen. There's an old saying that there's no sucker for a salesman than a salesman.

Sounds like the Dread Pirate Roberts except you were never the Dread Pirate in the first place.

Some very similar adverts on Facebook, too.

The funny thing is that they’re locally targeted, so if you go on vacation to a country with a low COL you’ll see those adverts on FB say “Make $200/month working from home!!!!”

The ones I see are user posts, either from hacked accounts or slightly incentivized users.

The local "for sale" groups on Facebook have a huge problem with this kind of spam - posts advertising "Work from home for Amazon, $2k a week!" with a link that goes to to google pages link that does seven redirects. The next week the same account posts "Work from home for Fedex, $2k a week!"

I report them every time, and report the account that posts them, but Facebook seems unwilling to remove the scammers.

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