I don't think true personal financial need drives much of this. Anybody smart enough to pull off a con like this could get an adequate job and make enough to live comfortably on.

I think the problem comes from people who won't stop there. Some are just sucking voids of desire; they always want more. Others want to be on top, to be number one. In my view, these people are broken.

So personally, I wonder about how we keep broken people in check, and how we rework society to produce fewer broken people.

There's a great bit in Iain Banks's Player of Games where the main character, who is from a post-scarcity utopia, visits a classic stellar empire, one clearly a stand-in for the worst parts of our current culture. The rich, imperial upper class types he's talking with have a hard time understanding the main character's lack of interest in owning. They ask, "Could you have a planet?" His take was roughly, "Well, I'm sure you could find an empty planet and land on it, but what would you do with it?"

It's something I think of often when I'm dealing with people trapped in a scarcity mentality.