Know Your Old School Grift - The Egg Curse Scam

 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_telling_fraud

Eggs?  Like an entire country’s economic news being obsessed with eggs.  And the sleight of hand of switching out real economic data and knowledge with…whatever you call this poor substitute.  This is why hundreds of thousands took to the streets in protest yesterday.  I’m sick of your scams.  Give me a functional eggconomy and government back.

There is some talent involved in the traditional egg curse grift.  Not everyone can pull off the magician part of switching out a normal egg with a rigged egg.  I could drone on about my extensive real life experiences in a “vote Republican or forget about a career” office environment.  Instead I choose to emphasize the difference between the egg curse scam and gematria grift.  At least for today.

So the first step is an old fashioned cold reading.  The bujo experts seek to get some quick info, is this person here kind of on a lark because fortune telling might be fun?  Is it for the lulz, or do they maybe believe in this enough to go further?  And what’s their financial situation like?  People get all kinds of crazy stupid when money is involved.  In gematria, the cold reading is spamming the internet with blog posts and videos.  Then the marks come to you, identifying themselves as gullible by posting comments.  And the financial situation is most often found by their mere presence in sports gematria content.  Smarter people will more likely know something funny is up.  The more desperate and less risk averse will be courted into at least giving it a try for a sports season.

The sleight of hand is missing from gematria grift.  There’s no need to have a physical object produced to switch out with a cursed object.  No need to tinker with rigging a physical object to be switched out.  Gematria itself is the switch.  There’s always an alternate narrative.  In addition to direct antonyms with the same values there’s always a handy and quite overused excuse.  The forces of evil are on to me and flipped the script.  Here’s what really happened yesterday with the numbers on that game I picked wrong.  Not tinkering around much in the physical world and reporting on numbers after the fact also has the advantage of creating any backstory you want.  You can go to the extent of creating fake family and friends, all that along with yourself can have an infinite variation in what fake events happened to them to produce mind bogglingly amazing gematria stories.  None of which can be proven or disproven.  None of which need to be concerned much with contradicting ongoing stories with other marks.  You’re in the target’s mind, not needing to sit right next to them to give you money, thanks to Patreon.

The finale of the bujo is destruction of the mark’s money.  The curse is lifted when the cursed money is destroyed.  Presumably you can move on with life and prosper after paying some kind of occult tax.  Instead your money was not destroyed, but went to someone who really just wanted to keep it.  You’ve been provided with some sort of finality on the status of the cursed money.  Gematria, on the other hand is weaker in this regard.  Instead of finality, well yeah sure your Patreon support disappeared from your bank account, it’s “good” money.  An investment.  One that you are required to keep giving as the imaginary carrot is dangled in front of you.  It’s a safe business model for the grifter in that whatever losses you have, YOU DID IT WRONG.  There’s an infinite supply of fake winners and their fake stories that can be created to counter how instead of you being cursed, you just happen to suck at decoding.

Finally, there’s the consequences of getting caught.  Both can be limited to a petty enough theft that it gets pointless to try and regain your lost money.  You would end up spending far more on a private detective and lawyers than the money you get back, unless somehow you scored someone who had six figures or more to hand over to you.  The only safe way is to not play in the first place.  Know your grifter tactics online and not just safeguard yourself, also educate those you care about.

Fascinating Horror

Fascinating Horror YouTube

I haven’t had this much fun since binge watching Forensic Files on HLN.  Forensic Files was essentially the same plot over and over with just slight twists.  First, here’s an incredibly stupid criminal.  Add said criminal doing something incredibly stupid.  Then the investigators look into it and find out that incredibly stupid criminal left enough of a trail and gets jailed.  Real life crime stories.  It’s CSI without supermodel female investigators and multiple easy to spot red herrings.

This YouTube channel is much the same.  Real life accident.  A bunch of people die.  The investigators find out that costs were cut somewhere and someone was negligent.  And maybe, only maybe, someone got nailed for being irresponsible.

I highly recommend you view at least some of these documentaries.  They are all short enough that you don’t need to invest an hour or even half an hour to digest the entire video. In the last eight videos as of this writing the longest is about 14 1/2 minutes.  The one thing I would change is the name of the channel.

The Horrors of Deregulation

It’s all fun and games until it’s you or someone you know that gets hurt by a tragic accident.  And the vast majority of times these horrors are always in part due to someone doing something they know was a bad idea and was just hoping they wouldn’t get caught.  Chicken grease in a restaurant that wasn’t up to cleaning standards adding extra fuel to that fire started by an electrical shortage.  The nightclub that locked the fire exits so people wouldn’t sneak in to avoid the cover charge.  The boat that capsized because it was too heavy.  The aircraft maintenance not done that should have been done.  The carbon monoxide fumes overcoming the train operators.  Over and over again these videos recap what went wrong leading to tragedy that could and should have been avoided.

This is somewhat like modern conspiracy content without the artificial scapegoat added.  The denouement is the higher ups are pretty much caught red handed and whether they get away with saying, “I’m sorry”, and a slap on the wrist or if there’s at least a hefty fine and some settlement money going to victims or families of victims.  It’s extremely rare that it’s just a freak accident that was unavoidable.  

At least occasionally there’s someone acting heroically like the man going back into the burning plane to save an infant.  Today, that man would be labeled a crisis actor in a modern conspiracy video.  The corporate big wheels would be ignored.  Instead it would be blamed on the propaganda generated scapegoat of the day.  Almost assuredly today this would be blamed on DEI policies.  Because sure.  Cutting costs by corporate fat cats is always the responsibility of people not being hired by corporate fat cats cutting costs.  The actual problem is not enough people being employed at all.  When your plane can’t land when you want it too it’s likely to be overworked air traffic controllers regardless of their scapegoatable qualities.

I recommend you watch a few of these old stories and get desensitized to it by that doom scrolling.  Or whatever you call doom scrolling on YouTube.  Accidents due to cost cutting are about to reach epic proportions in the U.S.  Every single member, and that’s not hyperbole, every single member in a high office in the current administration was placed in position due to loyalty to corporate interests and not actually doing a good job.  Cost cutting and trimming the budget doesn’t mean the stated reduction in existing fraud.  It means unemployment and reduction in staffing and not having to pay people to do a job that should be done by a person and not a robot.  If this channel or a similar channel exists a couple decades from now it will be recapping the horrors of unchecked climate change disasters, pandemic caused staffing shortages, sea level rise flooding, etc….

Whether there’s some bullshit gematria along with that remains to be seen.

Ignoring the Warnings From History

 

Years ago, Qanon nonsense in full swing, the warnings were sent out.  Gematria and other conspiracy light content was an invitation to the rabbit hole.  Enter and you will be greeted by friendly commentary.  Even if you are regurgitating completely batshit crazy disinformation, if you are part of the in crowd you’re a friend.  But, you need to graduate to the next level to be held up as a true believer.  Spread it to the potential new recruits.  Seek out those who know it’s stupid and relentlessly attack them.  Attack them with more made up bullshit.  Combine this with a sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to give up on your time investment and maybe even a hefty financial investment you are now in the clutches of a political influencer.  Now all <insert scapegoat party> here are evil.  All <insert in group party> are cool.  Until <in group party member> does something publicly disparaging to <in group party> and is now a <in group nickname for traitor>.

And no matter what the leaders of the party say or do, no matter how ruinous it is to the lives of others, no matter if it’s batshit crazy stupid everyone on the globe is now affected.

When tariffs were first announced as a trade war weapon, much was said about how they wouldn’t work as claimed.  It was actually going to do the opposite of what was claimed.  Even the WSJ went as far as calling it the dumbest trade war in history:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-25-percent-mexico-canada-trade-economy-84476fb2

But now we’re at gematria level nonsense in the trade war.

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tariffs-antarctic-islands-heard-mcdonald/

That’s right.  The precious exports of uninhabited Antarctic islands are being hit with a 10% tariff.  If the goal is to blitz scale the destruction of the U.S. economy to deliberately crash it, we are well ahead of schedule.  Further proof that each and every person in this administration hasn’t got a clue about governing.  All you get is lies and sound bites to be repeated to and by the easily misguided.  As global tensions increase, savings will dry up for lower class folks struggling to buy necessities.  The middle class with some savings will see the rate of return drop.  Our once a decade now economic downturn will be remembered in part by assessing tariffs on islands with no people as the scapegoats.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter if slipping these islands on to the list was a misguided error by someone genuinely not knowing the innocuous nature of the targets or it was just trolling for a joke.