You can't think a fax is a gift from God if you don't think there's a God, for example. And you won't be as predisposed to look at it as a break for you, if you don't think you "deserve" a break (or to be rich, or to be in business at all). And you immediately see the downside of any loan, the second you consider "Hey what if tomorrow isn't more flush than today?"

Protestant theology actually says the opposite of "you deserve blessings", historically. The "five solas" of the protestant reformation include "sola gratia" (salvation only by grace - undeserved good treatment), and "solus christus" and "sola fide" make similar points.

Certainly "prosperity gospel" teaching is rampant, but it has very little to do with the Jesus of the New Testament or with historical Protestantism.

> You can't think a fax is a gift from God if you don't think there's a God, for example.

You also wouldn't think that if you read the Bible much.

- Proverbs 13:11 - Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. - Proverbs 22:7 - The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender. - Hebrews 13:5 - Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you."

You can find many examples of professing Christians (or atheists) doing stupid things. That doesn't necessarily mean that Christianity or Jesus is the problem. It's more often that they don't follow what they claim to believe.

Imagine writing some really bad code under an extremely tight deadline. You know it’s a bad idea, you know it’ll be miserable to maintain, and that it’s a very brittle solution, but you write a few all-caps comments around it and a self-deprecating joke in the commit message, and resolve to refactor it once the deadline has passed.

The process of taking on bad tech debt is very, very similar to the process of taking on bad regular debt.

When your payments will be $800 per DAY I don't understand how the cost of having a lawyer look it over is of any consequence.

I do feel for people in this situation, particularly those who are driven to the home equity loans due to unfortunate events, like cancer, in their personal lives. But I feel that it needs to be said that there's a not insignificant number of people who are caught in these situations precisely because they failed to plan and have contingency money set aside, instead spending to keep up with the Joneses.

and

>due to unfortunate events, like cancer, in their personal lives...

I think it's a bit idealistic to think most Americans can save up to take care of a potential bout with cancer. Particularly if they are unfortunate enough to get certain varieties of cancer.

It's like a Manhattan penthouse. We can save for as long and as hard as we like, but for most Americans that purchase is just going to be out of reach. That's just life here in the US when it comes to cancer. The treatments are expensive and out of reach for most of us. Insurance can make it a bit better, but at the mean, we'll still have some pretty serious problems paying for the treatment.

I wonder if part of the Yellowstone MO was to use fax? Over email, you have to compete with the Nigerians, Russians etc, somehow fax would seem a little more legit.

Sad story this. I hope the victims can achieve some sort of redress.

They look for people who are both desperate and also naive or gullible or unrealistic or something. I spent nearly six years homeless. I was also extremely ill at the time. I absolutely was desperate.

I also refused to be sucked into certain things. No, I was not going to sleep with someone for money and risk getting AIDS, being arrested, etc and having my problems become drastically worse. No, I was not going to accept an offer of temporary housing that came with a huge and obvious downside that well could have left me in much worse straits than I was already in. No, I was not going to make use of homeless services that expected me to leave all my worldly possessions, including my computer that I could not afford to replace, in an unsecured area where anyone could walk off with it.

I looked for options that had clear and obvious benefit without huge fuck you potential.

One insurance company had a plan with a ten-percent MLR! (Marketing plans that didn't cover anything to college kids, of course.) They took in premiums and kept ninety-percent of it as profit.

Also, you only double your money every 3 months if none of your loans default and you collect everything. Most of these loans default. Profits are way slimmer than you're imagining, even for the scammers (Who I definitely agree should be punished for these practices).

One errant employee can fax blast once and wreck an entire company.

At the top, there's a lender. In this story, the lender is Yellowstone. The lender actually gives money to the customer.

A lender like Yellowstone has 200+ brokers they work with. The brokers are independent companies - "Business Lending LLC" or some generic name.

The brokers do whatever they can to find customers interested in a loan. They package that customers info into a loan application, and send it to Yellowstone. Yellowstone then decides to fund it or not. If they do, the rest of the contact is between Yellowstone and the small business borrower.

How does the borrower know which broker they worked with? Fax letterhead? Fake generic business name. Email of the rep they worked with? Possibly some random gmail. Etc. They get super unlucky and get fined? Declare bankruptcy, make a new company called "Business Lending 2 LLC".

It's not impossible to catch these guys, but it is hard enough to enforce that no current agency is especially interested.

Who pays in the following situation:

Company A fax-spams people.

Answer: It should be Company A, right? Good.

Now how about in this following situation:

Company A is legit. Person B doesn't like company A, and decides to make fake adverts and fax-spams people using a voip circuit.

Does Company A pay, because it was abut their products in a spammy manner? Or do they find who did it, and try to determine Person B?

But those fine/regulation doesn't seem to stop the telemarketers.

Any idea on why that's the case?

The gov agency is not enforce it? The lawyers can't do class action and make $ from filing those cases? Can they file any cases against AT&T or other phone companies? The spammers are outside the US?

However, I do wonder if their lack of caution may have helped their downfall to begin with. Housing isn't like tech startups. You can't just "grow at all costs" by hiring 50 employees and taking money from anyone and everyone.

In all seriousness... how do you protect naive people from scams like this? I guess my despair is that: you might protect them from this obvious scam. What if the scam is a little more polished?

I think this kinda thing will always happen to gullible folks. I'm not sure what the solution is.

Only if we are willing to say the same once someone decides to fight back with actual force. If someone outright kills a scammer doing this, are you willing to write it off as "Darwin's law" and let it be?

In this case, you stop government enforcing the scam.

You could say "Darwin", anyone dumb enough to get eaten deserves it.

But you could also say "anything that eats people is gonna get shut down hard", because you don't get to be at the top of the food chain if you let things keep eating you.