I think it's worse than that. Even what people think of as a "legit business" like Amazon and Walmart are scamming a significant percentage of their customers.

Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.

The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.

It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious. AI is going to be revolutionary for scammers. We're rapidly moving past call-bots that are good enough to bilk seniors. Imagine a MLM where the thousands of other suckers lining up to do the same thing are effectively invisible to the mark. That small fee the mark pays will seem like an unusual and extraordinary exception, but a necessary one. Suspicions will be allayed slickly, deadlines will be adjusted to add just the right amount of pressure, and the payoff will always be tantalizingly close. Every mark's online presence will be scraped so they can receive a custom tailored experience designed to press all their buttons.

It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?

We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.

Yep. And it's only going to get worse as the population of wealthy older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment continues to grow. They're the perfect target for online scams: still able to use computers and in control of substantial assets but also lonely and gullible.

>how much of the actual economy is above-board business

Illegal drugs are absolutely a single digit percentage of the economy.

>I'm starting to think a very large chunk of the internet (and national economy) basically runs on scamming people.

It's called convergence. As we import people from India and China en masse, we become a little bit more like them.

With no corresponding reverse flow, they remain unchanged, so the process is stable for as long as we allow it to be (and for as long as the cultural arbitrage exists.)

Land of the lie, home of the scam, the worst of which is the red team / blue team garbage you people devour everyday designed by the political elite to give you a distinction without a difference and keep you distracted and in conflict with your fellows.

A prohibited product and a scam are not the same thing, like, at all. Putting both of them together is disingenuous.

Dead Internet theory.

Fraud has been the fastest growing sector for about 20 years now. Much of this is movement of previously simply scammy products into actual scams. The kinds of things that you used to find advertised on late night television are now supercharged by Amazon availability, by ads that can directly target likely marks, and by the terrible state of reviews; it's so easy to manipulate that there's effectively zero correlation between quality and reviews on any major site, and paradoxically the sites actually selling products are the least awful at this.

This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.

And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.

It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.