Money Wise: Timeless Lessons on Building Wealth by Deepak Shenoy

Author:Deepak Shenoy [Shenoy, Deepak]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2021-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

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*** https://www.ft.com/content/3ae0eda2-0116-330d-b6e0-663d35fa456d

Suckered

Sundry scams and sharp practices

Don’t get suckered

Stories. Every scam is about telling a story and getting some sucker to believe it. I lived in a hostel during my engineering college days. Those four years were full of such stories – we made up quite a few.

There was the time we wanted our exams postponed. There was a plague outbreak in Surat, which was a few thousand kilometres north of campus. So someone conveniently found a dead rat and raised a fuss; it didn’t end well after the authorities, not taken in as we hoped, found evidence that the rat hadn’t died of the plague.

We couldn’t sucker the profs that time, but that didn’t stop us from trying again. We’d go to the doc on campus, and try to get letters to avoid having to go to class. Only, the doc had seen it all before and he would recommend a paracetamol tablet each time, unless you were visibly dying, which was not very often.

Once (this is way before cell phones) we decided to move all the clocks in our wing forward four hours because my roommate wanted to be at the college beach temple (we had a beach, really) at 6 a.m. We might have made it work, except that the sun refused to cooperate by rising early.

When I emerged into the real world, I realized something. People often try to sucker you, but unlike our college escapades, it’s not just for the lulz. It’s mostly to try to part you from

your money.

It’s not only the widow from Nigeria who wants you to believe she will give you a hundred million dollars that her late husband stashed away. Those scams are mostly obvious, but there are less obvious ones. These are often disguised as insurance policies.

So let me relate a few stories of financial scams and the suckers who fell for them, and this might help you pretend you’re never ever going to be the victim of such a story.

You’ve been on the other side of these conversations, at some point.

‘There’s no risk sir, it’s guaranteed.’

‘See, all the smart people have already bought it, I’ve sold seven this week, only three are left.’

‘It’s just like a fixed deposit, ma’am.’

‘I have inside news that this company is going to announce something big. I’m telling you this, for free, though I’m only your stockbroker.’

You’ve heard all this, and you’ve realized after a few years that maybe this whole finance thing is a scam. It’s not, but who’s to know whom to trust when everyone wears a suit?

The problem isn’t that you got suckered, or maybe you didn’t. The problem is this erodes trust because every scam starts with building trust and making you believe something. You have to trust someone, but the problem is that you can’t blindly do so.

This chapter is about many of the things that have suckered people in the past. It’s organized, more or less in order of suckerage, if there is such a word.

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