> The scammers were so convincing that in most cases, they managed to get continuous payments from their victims, according to the police.
They managed to secure continuous income streams of free money by talking to people on their phones. It’s extra money and surely they planned on doing more scams. That’s the motivation.
> Spain's GDP per capita is $30,000, and I'd assume they'd been doing it for at least 6 months, so they're not even making an average wage.
I guarantee they weren’t working on this 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. That’s not how scams like this work. They’re talking to people through WhatsApp. It’s about as demanding as texting their friends, albeit with additional overhead of maintaining the ruse and keeping facts straight. They could have carried on these conversations while working their day jobs.
Some people just get a thrill from committing crimes and extracting money or goods through crime. It doesn’t have to be life changing money, these people just like doing crimes and getting a few thousand extra dollars to do whatever they want with.
Of course, the actual cost is devastating once they’re caught. But they’re not thinking about that.
Doesn’t this pretty much describe a sales job? Except the product they are selling doesn’t exist.
I asked one 19-year-old defendant who had just been given a 30-year sentence for armed robbery with an AK-47 how much he actually got from the robbery? "$2000. $1000 for me, $1000 for my cousin." Ugh :(