Business Scams and Reverse Psychology
But there are other, more subtle cons out there. One I’m calling the ‘reverse psych’ con goes something like this:
- Person A comments on an item in a forum. Mild, pleasant, just trying to help out.
- Person B attacks him – a lot. Calling him names, accusing him of all kinds of things, and all completing unwarranted – in short, behaving completely psychotic.
- Everybody else reading about the attack, feels an immediate sympathy for Person A, goes and buys his book, visits his site, gets on his list, or whatever.
- Person A and Person B later meet over a beer, and split the ‘take’.
Do I have concrete examples of this? No. Is this happening? I’m certain of it.
People are terribly angry these days, and it doesn’t take much for them to fly off. But I believe there’s people who have caught on to the benefits, too.
It’s similar to what I said earlier about charity; I believe there are people who attack just to build sympathy for someone else.
Of course, not all such ‘extreme’ comments are from calculating and amoral people – there’s a goodly share of nutjobs out there as well to provide their fare share. I recently offered a product on the Internet in a 4-day special. Someone short on research but long on opinions decided I was doing something illegal, and tried to scare customers away. In the end, she possibly helped keep the forum posting alive longer – certainly, she entertained the readers with her quasi-coherent rantings.
And possibly I even got a sale or two from their sympathy, which became the genesis for this article.
So what do you do? I hate to preach callousness, but learn to take emotional outbursts with a grain of salt. Evaluate deals on features and benefits alone, and don’t let feelings sway you into a bad or unsafe deal. And be extremely suspicious of any postings that seem to go from 0-60 in no time at all – bizarre extremes of emotion may not be bizarre after all, just a new way of using reverse psychology to part you from your hard-earned money.
