Mortgage Scam Victims too Greedy?
Bob Aaron is a well respected Toronto Real Estate lawyer, who often writes for the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation of the Toronto newspapers. He provides useful and timely advice to individuals and his website contains links to his articles. So it was with some surprise that I read: Greedy consumers fuelled mortgage scam, in which Bob Aaron appeared to be blaming victims for falling for well planned mortgage relief scam.
In the article, Bob Aaron writes:
"I'm not sure whether I have any sympathy for them. I'm debating whether Augugliaro or the greedy consumers should shoulder the losses created by the scheme.I understand that many consumers are not financially astute, but I'm wondering how much of a role greed played in the whole Brixdale scam.
There is simply no logic to the possibility that a long-term mortgage could be paid off in a few months -- and provide participants with an additional promised $250,000 bonus at the end.
If I were the New York attorney general, I would have directed Augugliaro's restitution money -- if he pays it -- to charity rather than the injured participants. Mostly, they were the authors of their own misfortune." (my emphasis)
This is a common inference among regulators, lawyers and politicians who are entrusted with preventing scams and frauds. Well, well, well once again isn't this a fine mess - did you forget to check whether it was too good to be true, Ollie? Faced with a choice of trying to understand how ordinary reasonable economic agents could fall for the phantom dream dangled by the con criminals, or coming to the easy conclusion that the dumb buggers deserve not to be protected by our consumer laws, few take the time to work out how the deception was achieved.
Finally, if consumer protection laws aren't supposed to protect those who are the authors of their own misfortune, why would we need any consumer protection laws at all?
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