Easy Money

The internet is full of people trying to steal your money, and they’re not even pretending otherwise anymore. Two methods have emerged as particularly reliable, probably because fooling a lot of people at once is easier than anyone wants to admit.

First is the fake news approach: scammers flood Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with content designed to look like it came from real news outlets. iPhone for $17. Brexit Makes Workers Rich! Lose 12 Kilos in 30 Days. The bait is always something that sounds impossible enough to be interesting but just plausible enough that someone, somewhere, will click. The people running these operations—usually anonymous, usually operating overseas—apparently pull in six figures a month from the clicks alone.

The second method is worse because it operates inside legitimate spaces: shady ads running on actual news sites, Die Zeit and Spiegel Online and Focus Online, one click away from taking you straight into a scam. The news outlets know this is happening. They allow it anyway because the money is good.

I scroll past these constantly now. The iPhone deals, the weight loss promises, the weird financial schemes. At first I noticed every one. Now I’ve gotten good at the shape of a scam, at recognizing the layout before I even read the text. But that’s not the win it feels like—it just means I’ve gotten used to living in a landscape where everyone’s running some kind of angle, and the places that are supposed to tell us the truth have decided a cut of the fraud is worth it.