When it comes to the modern world of #enshittified, terrible businesses, no addition to your vocabulary is more essential than "#bezzle," #JKGalbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

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#Bezzle (n):

1. "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it" (#JKGabraith)

2. #Uber

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

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In other words, the Venture Predator constructs a pile of shit so large and impressive that investors are convinced that there must be a pony under there somewhere.

There's another name for this kind of arrangement: a #Bezzle, which #Galbraith described as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

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Targeted ads are a cesspit of #AdFraud. 15% of all ad revenues are just *unaccounted for*:

https://twitter.com/swodinsky/status/1511172472762163202

The remaining funds aren't any more trustworthy. Ad-tech is a #bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/

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@scanlime This tends to be common to pretty much all investment-type scams.

The scammer goes into detail about how one specific edge failure case or advantage is avoided / instantiated. But fails to paint the bigger picture.

I'm not sure this is entirely intentional. Often scammers may be deceiving themselves, and there's a Darwinian selection process by which effective scams fight it out amongst each other to survive.

The tendency is well-established. I'd run across mention of it in John Kenneth Galbraiths excellent, brief, highly-readable, and extremely informative The Crash: 1929, on the Wall Street crash leading to the Great Depression.

That's also where the concept of the #bezzle is introduced, a favourite concept of mine and apparently @pluralistic based on his numerous references to same.