How to Spot a Psychopath

Another outstanding piece of mystifying spam:

Join the Thousands of Americans GETTING OUT OF DEBT!

Be DEBT FREE in as little as 12 MONTHS.

Please visit the link below and get a free debt consultation today. NO OBLIGATION!

http://eurocasinobj.com/indexd.html

Euro. Casino. BJ?!

Why, that's exactly the sort of URL at which I'd expect to find sensible debt reduction advice!

If you go to the root of http://eurocasinobj.com/, you find exactly what you'd expect to find - a casino site offering you a no doubt completely kosher $555 Welcome Bonus as long as you run the SetupCasino.exe file they want you to download.

http://eurocasinobj.com/indexd.html, on the other hand, redirects to the similarly mystifying URL http://heroesthai.com/, which is a generic Web-2.0-looking "Goodbye Debt" site.

And which, of course, is probably also a big fat scam.

It's an example of the peculiar rule of thumb which states that people with little money are easier to scam out of that money than rich people. Actually, "debt elimination" scams take it even further - they screw money out of people who have less than no money to start with!

A search of the Federal Trade Commission's site for "unsecured debt" is enlightening.

Sometimes the scammers claim that they'll negotiate with creditors in some special magical way that a normal customer couldn't, accept payment for doing so, and then just don't do anything. Genius!

The more creative scammers come up with a line of bull akin to that spouted by "tax protesters". There are a bunch of peculiar arguments in this category. Generally, they all assert that widely-held assumptions - like, for instance, the notion that it is legal to lend money at interest, or that when a person borrows money he personally now owes it to the lender, or that civilian courts are not military courts - are not true.

These arguments also have in common the fact that not a one of them holds more water than a tea bag.

The FTC's actual advice to people who're knee deep in debt is also useful. They advise debtors to seek out cheap-to-free credit counselling, and specifically avoid one-size-fits-all expensive "debt reduction" outfits.

Especially the ones with weird URLs.