No Bullshit HYIP Blog, A Part of No Bullshit Network

After posting a comment to Jude’s late January post about A3Union, I was again struck by the ongoing and unanimous success it and the more sophisticated HYIP scams like it experience. Once a novelty, such programs have become much more commonplace over the past year or two as scammers adapt the working of their craft to a (only slightly) more discriminating and educated potential member pool. The outspoken advocate of investor - or gambler, if you prefer - education that I am, I think recognizing what it is that certain programs have in common, loosely categorizing them and analyzing them on that basis is of paramount importance for understanding the world of HYI (a generic label that encompasses HYIPs, surfs, and so on). Profit - and survival, for that matter - do not come without understanding, so anyone looking to make money online by unconventional means will have to do some considerable thinking. So, put your thinking cap on for a moment and follow me into the slick and sordid muck of what I call legitimation scams.

Legitimation? I know, I know: too many five syllable words in one post is a bad thing; but don’t write me off as a pretentious dictionary browser just yet, because this word is a very appropriate description. “Legitimation” is a noun that means something like “an act which establishes a state of validity, justification, authority, incontestability” etc. In other words, it’s the thing, event, or statement that give something legitimacy.

All scams strive by definition, at some level, to inspire a perception of legitimacy. There is a wide range of sophistication, ranging from simply retaining the generic ready-made reference to “forex trading” in the goldcoder’s script to the complex duplicitious machinations undertaken by such programs as SolidInvestment, Swisscash (uh huh) and, yes, A3Union, among others. The difference isn’t one of kind - they’re all scams, after all - but degree. There’s little to say about the simplistic end of the spectrum: programs populating the simple scam side are recognized by virtually everyone that plays them for the hit-and-run crap shoot that they are. As the spectrum is traversed the rhetorical and structural layering piles on until the sophisticated programs are reached. Not coincidentally, these programs are the most notorious, and deserve to be broken out into their own category: Legitimation scams.

The concept is simple, really, and easy to apply. Legitimation scams, as I wrote elsewhere, are those which “reflect an obsessive dedication - an unfaltering over-eagerness” to come off as real. They work tirelessly, night and day (whatever timezone they reside in) to maximize the effectiveness of what is, in essence, a propaganda-driven fundraising campaign. What are the propagandizing tools they deploy? They usually provide a physical address, phone number and occasionally online customer support, appeal to their lengthy but unverifiable offline history and incorporated status - “please view our articles of incorporation” - to answer detractors (as though that’s definitive proof of their legitimacy), have some variant on the acquisition/buyout/takeover/merger theme during their program’s lifecycle, repeatedly boast about the quantity of funds under management, issue bombastic denunciations of critics, whom they label “jealous competitors’, have or will soon have their own debit card, translate their sites into different languages to inspire global appeal and a sense of global presence (not to mention open up member markets that remain untapped because of lingual barriers), and so on.

The intended product of these features and characteristics is the conception that this program, in contrast to all others, is established on an unshakeable foundation, proven by years of operation, run by a very capable admin and staff and as such offers an unparalleled and unprecedented opportunity. It’s the needle in the haystack, the diamond in the rough, the nectar of the HYIP gods, and the stuff of a hundred other cliches. The details of each legitimation scam may vary, but the bedrock content, feel and often look - which usually consists of a customized script that is leveraged in every way as a marketing tool - are very similar. The exit strategy executed by these programs are also much the same, dominated by a core of flimsy excuses wrapped heavily in a labyrinthine rhetorical system of deferral, diversion and denial.

That suffices to describe the type of program to which I’m drawing attention here, a sub-set of what I’ve referred to in previous articles as “sophisticated scams”. If you have been actively and attentively involved in the arena for several months you might recognize examples of legitimation scams, past and present. If you haven’t encountered an example and/or doubt such programs exist, I challenge you to visit the “closed/scam” folder of any of the major “industry” forums. Those program threads that have the most pages are mostly legitimation scams.

A complementary aspect of scams that is equally important to the hallmarks of the scam and MO of the scammer is the role of the scammed. This is self-evident to most; but in the case of legitimation scams, there’s more going on that might not be immediately apparent. More on that in the second installment….

Andrewunknown

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