Maybe it's because he's an idiot.

Yes

Deepfake Musk asked her to have his kids.

He donates money to himself.

Half of his grifts is the bait-and-switch.

Elon's good for 10% of what he promised inside the first hour he promised it. After that, all bets are off.

It's kind of worrying that that's all it took to get him to drain his bank account. The Elon Musk deep fake was probably unnecessary, he seems like the type to fall for the very obvious Nigerian Prince scam of old.

The old saying goes, it's impossible to fool and honest man, and I don't know if that's necessarily true or not, but it's definitely easier to con someone who genuinely thinks it's posable to get something for nothing. People like that tend to not take responsibility for their own lives and think that the world owes them something. People like that are a con man's best friend.

i doubt he really wanted that EV,he thought it was making an "investment" for a larger return.

Just shove em back in there 👌

Avoiding scams is as easy as walking a single step. Yet almost everyone has tripped at least once in their life

We're exposed to scams all the time, all it takes is falling for one of them. Have a little empathy, because it absolutely could be you one day

You might be surprised about this, but as people age, so do their brains. They do not function as well and sometimes develop serious issues. Stop assuming everyone has the same resources to work with. Protect the vulnerable from bad actors.

Old people spent almost all their lives living in a different world, where you could trust and believe in certain things. That world has dissolved just as their brains got too old to adapt to the change. It's hard for everyone to keep up, but for some people it's impossible. My father in law is like that, his smartphone is always full of crap because if he sees a popup advert telling him he needs to install something, he'll do as he's told. He can't tell the difference between an advert and a system message. He grew up in a world where most of the time you could basically trust what people were telling you, especially if it looked official. Modern technology and media has no consideration for such vulnerable people, except for finding ways to exploit them.

Once you get into non-standard investments (so not stocks/etfs/CDs/etc.) things get a lot murkier a lot quicker. At some point you are just trusting some person with a lot of money. I mean look at Bernie Maddoff, he was just some guy promising a return on investments.

hes 69, i doubt hes going to a university in florida. probably retired there for the low taxes,.

I don't see where his wife is a gold digger. According to the article, he's fallen for repeated scams and, the way they work is that once you've fallen for one scam, they sell your information to other scammers as an easy mark. As her spouse, he probably has access to all her money; if they get divorced, she'll at least be able to protect her half of their assets.

[Notice that it doesn't say his wife wants to leave him, just get divorced.]

I feel like it's not just being tech-savvy though. He seems to lack basic common sense.

Why would you assume that a free car giveaway would necessitate you paying transfer fees, why wouldn't that have already been pre-arranged. After all it's a Tesla car presumably Tesla the ones who are going to deliver it. Additionally why would the competition be exclusive to a niche Facebook group and not a national campaign. It all just seems very obviously a scam.

My parents aren't particularly tech savvy and often send me AI garbage but they wouldn't be easy marks because both of them have critical thinking skills, or at least my mother does. But my dad has learnt to do what he's told.

his wife is also likely a gold digger?

Would you stay married to that dumbass? That stupidity is unforgivable.

I dunno. My mom is his age and taught us how to build crystal radios when we were kids for fun. She still does it every few years with the grandkids as they grow up. She's still sharp as a whisk.

Pfft, I would divorce my husband if he fell for a Musk grift, and it has nothing to do with gold digging. It would, however, mean that my husband kept hidden for a long time (which is impressive, I gotta say) just how big of a fucking moron he is and I won't be married to that. And he should be avoiding anything to do with Musk like the plague anyway.

Also, it would mean that he made the decision to throw away a bunch of money without even talking to me about it (because I would veto the hell out of it), which means he's an asshole.

Both good reasons to divorce someone imo.

Cutting someone loose who makes terrible financial decisions is not gold digger behavior. They are likely retired and have limited resources to worry about and he just blew a big chunk of that. This also doesn't speak well of his intelligence overall so maybe this was a long time coming.

You don't have to be tech savvy to realise the adage "if it sounds too good to be true...". I would have thought Americans of all people would develop armour against scams. But even a modicum of due diligence like asking relatives, or googling his situation might have protected him.

I should add that my dad is 80 and housebound and gets scam calls all the time and bats them off like flies so being old is not an excuse.