Reading this article in Bloomberg Businessweek (I’ve included the link below) reminded me of that movie, Boiler Room, that starred Vin Diesel, Ben Affleck, Giovanni Ribisi, and Nia Long, among others. In that movie–which if you haven’t seen, is worth putting on your rainy day list as one of those movies to see someday–a group of twenty-somethings manufacture an easy path to riches. All that’s needed is a competitive drive to succeed and a complete and utter lack of morals. That movie came out in 2000, but on a miniature scale could easily have summed up the Wall Street subprime mortgage crisis that happened years later, which gave us the Great Recession. Bad actors (I’m talking in real life; not the cast of Boiler Room, which were great), given the right tools, can wreck all sorts of unbelievable havoc that impact the rest of us.
The last year we’ve seen what bad actors in Russia have done on Facebook. The articles about how they used Facebook to try and influence our election and stir discord in our country have been too numerous to count. This article in Bloomberg shines a light on some of the other bad actors using Facebook. Like for the characters in Boiler Room, the objective is money. The causalities of their money-making schemes are nameless. Not shown. Those nameless ones are the suckers. Us.
This article is worth reading. I found it amazing that Facebook reps, with all that’s going on in the news, presented at a convention in mid-2017 to a room full of attendees all eager to run ad scams. Those attendees were just like the new recruits in Boiler Room. Young and eager and ready to lay waste to humanity.
(Bloomberg Businessweek article link below)
Dave Buschi 