It became apparent that (a) he had a huge pile of messy PHP, WordPress-based sites, and then (b) expressed contempt for paying $35 an hour for programmers since his opinion was you could get programmers in the third world for $5 an hour. He negotiated me down to $25. I ended up declining.
Like many people who crow about how they’re a “millionaire”, when it came time to show the money, he was suddenly really concerned about very small amounts of money here and there.
People like this Tai guy pay a premium for screwing people over, they pretty clearly could have made more money, more safely, if they didn't love the feeling of getting one up on you. That explains their attitude better than some virtue of frugality.
But $35/hr was a pittance for a programmer even in 2010. Tai Lopez is a gigantic tool for cheaping out on that.
Basically, your net worth is total asset minus your primary residence.
Net worth includes equity in your primary residence. That is the value of the property minus outstanding mortgage amount.
There are some investment scenarios where net worth is calculated minus primary residence, but those are specialty cases that are explicitly called out.
Tai posed as the latter, so suddenly caring about $35 an hour is very suspicious.
It starts to be cool when you have like $10 million dollars. We need a term for people who have 8 figures now that 7 is so common.
He says anyone can label themselves “AI automation expert” and charge thousands of dollars for it, then just use vibe coding tools to do the job or outsource it.
He also says he built an entire app using replit.
People such as database administrators.
I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I know nothing else about him and I hope to keep it that way.
And many houses featured in videos are content houses... (lavish rentals for influencers to have a luxury background for their videos)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_house
https://blog.giggster.com/how-to-rent-a-tiktok-collab-house-...
He later had a $126k lawsuit for unpaid furniture: https://radaronline.com/p/todrick-hall-sued-126000-unpaid-fu...
Yup. It was bad enough 10 years ago, but now... IMHO the despair has gone exponentially worse. On one side, you got big name YouTubers/Twitch/Kick streamers getting absurdly large deals to shill VPNs and supplements of questionable utility and safety, then for young women you got OnlyFans and its various copycats with excesses like Lil Tay making 1 M$ in 24 hours after turning 18 (problematic in itself - it seems like almost every female child/juvie actor has to cope with absolute weirdos doing countdowns to when they "turn legal").
And on the other side you get an entire generation of people who know that they will never even have the chance to own a home even if they work their entire life.
[1] https://www.eonline.com/news/1420720/lil-tay-says-she-made-s...
> For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong."
I find it difficult not to do at least a little bit of victim blaming here...
If you mean just a "dating site where all female profiles are fake, generated by site itself", then well, it's just called a "dating site". Whole dating sites industry - with hundreds if not thousands of companies, downstream industries providing them traffic, payments, and services of all kinds, industry associations, conferences, rich networking and whatnot - is doing just that. Always did. The few "real" dating apps/sites like Tinder are just a tip of the iceberg - no one tries to really imitate them - it's not possible.
Almost everything viable on the Internet today, is a "scam" in this (to my taste, extremely strict and old-fashioned, definition). Just because all available real attention has already been harvested a long time ago, and cost of traffic, which is extremely high now because extensive way of attracting it - by having people spend more time at the screen - is no longer available as people already spend glued to the screens all day - so every time to have them visit your site you have to pay more than the other guy pays to have them visit theirs - it's an auction and prices are through the roof.
Thus, if you sell people something which isn't fake, you aren't going to turn a profit. So all who did, are out of business - with the exception of yes, "big tech" monopolies that can exploit the shit out of people in a way no run of the mill scammer like those two poor hapless chaps can even dream of.
Why do you think you need AI for this? You don't even need Indians for this, Americans will do it. I remember someone showing me a site a couple years ago that recruited for the job, and there was a Reddit where they talked about working it and how the rates paid were changing.
Governments have essentially never looked into it, despite it having gone on uninhibited for 20+ years and at the scale of billions annually for at least 16+ years.
Until Match bought the industry it was pretty much impossible to launch a dating site with profiles. The industry standard was to post fakes. Real users would then receive stock responses to keep them around until real people showed up. No AI needed. Just a bag of standard emails. Guys are incredibly dumb and ego driven. It’s very easy to get them to think a beautiful stranger is into them.
Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do.
The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly
There are also many “legitimate” tech companies that don’t make any profit, but balloon their valuation all the way to an IPO or SPAC and then profit off public investors.
So your definition still can’t distinguish between “real” companies and scam companies
They didn't need LLMs to build bots.
Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.
If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.
E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s).
That was an interesting era of YouTube, for sure.
It's horrifying.
Not to suggest he is or is not guilty but that being loud often makes others watch you more closely.
https://www.ponzivineyards.com/
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ponzi+Vineyards/@45.379619...
But if they had been honest about the performance of the businesses and the way the money was being used, they would not have attracted as much investment money. A few gullible people, but not $112 million worth.
The misrepresentation was key to attracting the investment.
They told investors lies about how well the companies were doing and how the funds were to be used.
The Ponzi part comes from paying old investors with money from new investors but telling everyone it’s from the business’ cash flow, which was a lie.
After tons of internal crisises, mismanagement, and consecutive revenue losses, Radioshack got delisted from exchanges and eventually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015.
After that, Radioshack got acquired, got mismanaged again, the parent company went broke, and Radioshack filed for bankruptcy again in 2017.
By the time Tai Lopez got his hands on it (late 2020), there was pretty much nothing of value left there, except the brand (and even the brand was a questionable value proposition at that point tbh).
I’m sorry but what kind of idiot would believe this about the zombie online version of Radio Shack that remained?
But the SEC claims Lopez and Mehr misrepresented her experience. Before joining REV, she had worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a promoter at a radio station, and as an assistant to Lopez at a prior endeavor, the complaint alleges. """
Nice family. Hopefully they get lots of jail time.
https://youtu.be/u8wwBIA8wMw?si=cKWzNq4Qu_nCQcMA
I tried to pick out the most painful segments, but it was hard to choose. 6m30s is a strong contender but 28m31s takes the crown for me.
If they are found guilty, their company will get fined, they will still be rich.
This will keep happening unless you a) take back their personal wealth and return it to investors and b) put them in jail & c) black list them from holding office at a corporation in the future.
Pre-Trump that is NOT what used to happen in these cases. Defrauding your investors used to actually land rich people in jail.
This is exactly what Martin Shkreli spent his time in prison for (and not for anything related to Daraprim drug price increases, despite what some people apparently believe, as I discovered).
TLDR (with a great deal of oversimplification): he ran a hedge fund (MSMB) and was lying to investors about how much money the fund had and about the investment strategies. He then started a pharma company called Retrophin and used some of his equity in Retrophin to compensate the MSMB investors for their losses (without their knowledge, i.e., basically the exact same issue with lying about investment strategies to investors he had earlier). It just so happened that Retrophin ended up performing fairly well at the time, and that equity actually ended up making profit for those investors overall.
Investors/company making money in the end is not a valid defense against fraud charges. If a hedge fund manager or a CEO cashes out the investor/company accounts in secret, goes to Vegas to place it all on red, makes a gain, and then puts it back into the investor/company account, it is still a crime. Despite the fact that the investors/company made money in the end, I don’t think it is wrong to call this a fraudelent move.
However, the wheels of justice tend to be slow, and it might take some time for the consequences to catch up. Those fraudelent actions on Shkreli’s part were taken around 2012-2013, the investigation was opened in 2015, and he got convicted in 2017.
perihelions•4mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29607989 ("RadioShack – Bringing Cryptocurrency to the Mainstream (radioshack.com)" (2021))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31958998 ("RadioShack reinvents itself as a crypto platform with wild tweets (washingtonpost.com)" (2022))
(Amusing to count five different HN'ers calling it a "scam", and two more calling it a "Ponzi").