How An Astute Scam-Buster Got Scammed

Many years have passed since I last posted here.  Many things experienced, relationships born and ended and reincarnated,  projects launched and completed and resurrected, and a lot in between.  I never expected to find myself writing another entry here again, given my life has moved far away from the core of my interests when I started this blog, namely computationally analyzing games of chance and trying to objectively demonstrate whether a player could realistically make a consistent profit, let alone a living, by playing them.  I was motivated by the hope I would be able to help just one person see the light of truth in these matters and save him from losing a penny at best, or to stop losing much more at worst.  It turned out, my work was able to help many, and I am so grateful modern technology could provide a permanent residence online to keep the content alive for ongoing consideration.  But little did I realize the one I was helping most was myself, as my story will show.

Readers know I’m fairly intelligent and dedicated to demonstrating and telling what is true.  I am passionate about this, and thanks to my relentless skepticism which demands the highest level of evidence, I’m able to quickly get to the heart of a claim and determine its veracity.  So, how was it such an astute scam-buster got scammed?  And in an embarrassing large way?  How could Virtuoid, renown for being able to easily spot the small-time scammers, fall prey to a pretty big-time one, and even to this day, still entertain the very small possibility he was not scammed at all, but was just terribly unfortunate to have encountered a completely incompetent business partner?

Alas, had I approached my business decisions in the real world with as much critical analysis and precision as I had my numerical simulations of casino games, I would’ve been able to avoid many years of worry, anguish, loss, and sleepless nights.  Wisdom does not necessarily come from the results of running hundreds of thousands of simulations, whether of dice or cards or business scenarios.  But common sense becomes common only after generations of experience, life’s own version of running simulations.  By then, not heeding it is one’s own fault.  Sometimes, life rewards the stupid.  But usually not.

The end of this story is still being written in life, but the story is long enough such that I should start telling it now.  What motivates me is what motivated me to start ImSpirit way back when:  to hopefully help at least just one person avoid the mistakes I’ve committed, thereby saving him time, energy, money, and life.  And perhaps, as it has happened already, find it might somehow help my future self in unimaginable, unexpected ways.  It’s sometimes fun to ponder and joke about mystical things like karma, but when hints of it seem to actually be manifesting in life, I can only feel more humbled and in awe of the force behind life.

Thus it feels fitting that I share my story here, since the heart of the moral is consistent with the original theme of my work, and because thanks to it, I was able to avoid going down a possibly catastrophic path and be pointed instead to a much more trustworthy source of help when I most needed it.

The enlightened know that when we give freely, it comes back tenfold.  Is the same true when knowingly giving to a scammer?  Perhaps it is a hundredfold in that case?  Unfortunately, I am not enlightened enough yet to trust it will.  Nevertheless, I share my story, flawed as I am, with the hope that doing so will begin to pay back or pay forward how richly I’ve been blessed with such interesting experiences.

In the next post, I will begin this long tale, well, at the beginning.