There are so many businesses now which exist mainly to cheat you, operating at the very edge of what’s technically legal, and relying on their customers not really understanding the full terms of the deals they’re agreeing to. It’s sickening.
- Seniors are sold various quackish financial products like annuities which are a terrible deal for them.
- Timeshares, which nearly never work out in the favor of the consumer (and whose value collapses 50-80% instantly if you look at what they go for on the resale market)
- Prepaid card products that cost a bunch of money to load and then incur monthly fees too (exploiting those who have for whatever reason got blacklisted from banking)
- Every financial product that has a 25%+ interest rate, actually, which isn't limited to those with bad credit. Even if you have an 899 credit score, if you walk into Nordstrom and get their credit card, you will have a close to 30% rate on that. This whole business model is obviously built on tricking people into spending money they don't have and carrying a balance.
- Salesmen hawking solar panels that come to my front door and promise me all kinds of savings. Note: Probably only half these are scams! Just have to figure out which half.
- Health insurers, pretty much across the board. They do things like declare the most dominant ambulance service in San Francisco, the SFFD, "out of network", so the SFFD then sends you a bill for $1000 if you had to use an ambulance. The neat lifehack by the insurer is that most people will just curse, cry, maybe go into debt, and pay it. Only like 10-20% of patients will file a complaint with the insurer's state regulator, and those can just be quickly paid. Result: Savings of 80-90% for health insurance company! (If this one sounds oddly specific, you can guess why.)