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Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
111–120 of 123 posts
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#112As this is a tech forum, I expect that the name that stands out is Radio Shack, and I do agree that that story is tragic. For me, as a long time New Yorker, the other name that stands out is Modell's. They were, for quite a long time, a fixture in New York City and beyond. Even for us not sports inclined, we still knew Modell's as a reliable retailer of sneakers throughout the years. Arguably, their Covid era bankrup…
Modell's was the go-to if your team won last night.
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unironically the gap between his AI automation agency and VC backed "Enterprise Automation" startups is smaller than you think..
Quite. Sounds as much like Builder.AI, the London startup where AI genuinely did stand for "actually Indians", as it does Amazon Go, whose pick-and-go stores had their cameras monitored by people in India to ensure it all worked as they said it did.
Don’t forget most vertical AI “agent” startups
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
He also ran a series of now-defunct scam dating sites with fake profiles around 2010-2015, and has been quite consistent at only operating scam businesses in the past 15 years. I know nothing about the people who hand over money to this guy, and I hope to keep it that way.
Oh god, I can just imagine how LLMs could make this even worse. A dating site where half the people are just bots stringing you along.
Uhh that's just every dating site since at least the 2000s.
They didn't need LLMs to build bots.
Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.
If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
He would pay to have his videos as ads on other people’s videos. E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s). That was an interesting era of YouTube, for sure.
When people leave autoplay on, they might not even realize they watched an ad, I guess?
There are armies of bad parents or babysitters that just hand baby an Ipad, not on child or restricted mode, and just let youtube literally Clockwork Orange a human being.
It's horrifying.
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#116I can't read "Ponzi scheme" without thinking "Bonzi Buddy scheme". Y'all should just change the term already.
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#117Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that against TOS? Was it scam?
It's not against YouTube's ToS to run pre-roll ads of any length, of course. But I think he was just selling get-rich-quick schemes or something. At the time YouTube ads were more rare and generally short, like 15 second TV commercials, so it was weird to see long-form content as ads. He absolutely saturated the site with this ad for a while to the point that it became a meme. I'm guessing a significant percentage of…
Yeah I still occasionally get really long ads that must be just to see who watches all (most?) of them.
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#119Circa 2010, I met Tai and he wanted some work done for his portfolio of dating websites he had back then. (He had a whole bunch of them targeted to various ethnic groups, religious subgroups and so on.) It became apparent that (a) he had a huge pile of messy PHP, WordPress-based sites, and then (b) expressed contempt for paying $35 an hour for programmers since his opinion was you could get programmers in the third w…
I don't know Tai Lopez and he seems like an asshole based on his public persona but I think you'd be surprised by the number of (especially first generation) millionaires who will negotiate over pennies. The easiest way to have a lot of money is to earn a lot and not spend a lot.
I've known several very rich people and the first thing I learned was that they are rich because they never spend their own money on anything.
Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait until you hear about tech startups Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do. The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly
I true scam company is one that was never intended to make a profit but just steal investor money.
Many if not most scam companies scam the consumer, which is indistinguishable from profiting off a consumer.
There are also many “legitimate” tech companies that don’t make any profit, but balloon their valuation all the way to an IPO or SPAC and then profit off public investors.
So your definition still can’t distinguish between “real” companies and scam companies