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the acrophobic and vhi person experienced frightening experiences or they dreamt them up they may have incidentally linked instability with danger others don t make the same associations the individual who doesn t fear heights isn t braver or made of a stronger constitution their body just doesn t send danger signals at heights and their brain won t amplify those signals we do it to ourselves in other words some of us may have experienced real life incidents that forever shaped our reaction to heights but most of us train our overly creative brain to react to heights in such a manner if we have always imagined the worst and or experienced decades of nightmares where heights played a main character our trained brain will not handle vestibular mismatches smoothly and our body won t stabilize posture very well when visual cues are so far away as i wrote sufferers might not consider that answer an epiphany and it might not prevent the pack of wolves we call friends from whipping out their measuring sticks to prove superiority but it is an answer it s also an adequate answer to the question if you received such an adrenaline rush from tweaking your fear why wouldn t you want to do it again adrenaline rushes are short term fixes they re not the answer as we will be just as afraid next time as we were this time because the portion of our brain that regulates proprioception or equilibrium when we re high up is still going to be a little off my final word to those who suffer from these varying levels of fear when they re high up is there is something wrong with you but it s not what you think you re not a coward a fraidycat or a wimp your brain is just a little tiny bit off and in the grand list of physical psychological and mental disorders this might be the one everyone would pick if they were forced to pick one at birth so the next time someone calls you chicken a wuss or a fraidycat you can now say well it s partly that but it also has something to do with my overly active sensory motor system cranking out premium grade instability signals the moment i achieve altitude my brain simply refuses to handle visual vestibular mismatches with any dignity whatsoever and yes it s mildly embarrassing as i ve never actually plummeted from anything noteworthy after mining the scientific research put into the study of me and my 22 28 brethren the best answer i found is that i did this to myself my overly creative brain has changed me into a certified neural drama queen who instantly routes even minor sway into the instability equals instant doom shortcut anytime i achieve at least twenty feet of altitude you on the other hand haven t trained your brain to broadcast or amplify overly theatrical danger signals congratulations you calm biological member of the majority but you re not necessarily braver or composed of a stronger constitution your hardware just isn t quite as hysterically talented as mine i m not afraid of spiders snakes enclosed spaces injections germs thunder and lightning dogs flying or flying dogs but i do have one highly irrational and emotional fear related to my visual vestibular conflict when i started my research i wanted to find that we have some gene variant or some sort of genetic clue involving the inner ear that helps us regulate balance i wanted to be able to say that my condition was directly related to genetics so i could blame someone or something else the best answer i found is that modern scientific research finds that my system is likely over responsive to height related visual vestibular mismatch something that can be influenced by genetics but also by experience conditioning and neural wiring i wanted something i could drop on my family members and obnoxious friends but there s no conclusive proven casual links i wanted to find satisfying clarity but every study kept coming back to the idea that an overwhelming majority of my problem is all my fault and the same level of creativity i use to write on this site is the culprit fueling my greatest fear it s an answer but it s not a very satisfying one falling for fraud july 2 2026 july 28 2026 rilaly leave a comment this article is not a self help tips guide i considered summing this article up with a long list of the tips i ve learned over the years to help you avoid falling prey to internet fraud my next thought was that i m not smart enough to write a comprehensive list that could help you avoid falling prey to everything out there those lists are out there and i encourage everyone to seek out but i m not brave bold or brilliant enough to write one this article will simply detail my personal and anecdotal experiences in this world june 22 2026 florida couple loses 141 000 00 to sweepstakes scam the couple loses their car their income and their home after the dementia suffering husband fell for a scam that informed him he won 4 million in a lottery yahoo news the stupid things dumb people do was how one yahoo commenter summed up their reaction to this story i would ve loved that reaction in my teens and twenties they re just saying what we re all thinking i would ve said in between giggles working as a fraud agent at a fortune 500 company changed me i talked to these dumb people and if they re dumb then we re all a lot dumber than we think who are the victims i cannot believe this happened to me was the most common reaction our victims had they would tell us how intelligent and experienced they were they would talk about how difficult their jobs were and how their job required a high level of intellect that should never fall for something like this i thought i knew enough to know how to avoid something like this but here we are they would add does that sound like you and the shocked embarrassed and somewhat ashamed reactions you might have for falling for the stupid things that dumb people do if you insist that only morons fall for online fraud consider this industry experts suggest that the total figures we have for cybercriminal activity skew low because most victims are so embarrassed and humiliated that they fell for something so stupid that they won t even report it to a fraud agent who is as low on the law enforcement totem pole as one could get they ll never meet me so why would they care what i think they do not want to go through the details because they cannot bear having one person know how dumb they were they just want to forget it ever happened the fraud agents i worked with rarely characterized victims as dumb or stupid because we heard from so many victims a day we heard so many different stories that we knew the victims we were talking to weren t in the minority we usually spent the first couple minutes of every phone call talking these victims down i may have considered these victims dumb or stupid when i first started working there but i heard so much since that point that i knew i was as vulnerable as they were i ve heard from the prototypical little old ladies living on a pension who had a little money set aside for a more comfortable living i talked to hard working joes who worked so hard their whole life and saved their 10 a year to allow their family to just barely escape lower middle class i heard from so many representatives of age and economic demographic backgrounds that i progressed through a variety of emotional reactions that ended with sympathy and moved to empathy after i heard the wide array of schemes that our customers fell for if i were to draw up a pie representing the typical victim old people on a pension would represent the largest section but that cut wouldn t be as large as you might think if you re one of those who refuse to accept the idea that you re a lot more vulnerable than you imagine let me say that i was you and you are me other than the i m too smart to fall for something so stupid the greatest vulnerability i saw among victims was greed the victims talked about how losing this money meant losing their comfortable lifestyle which naturally led me to wonder why they would sacrifice that relatively comfortable lifestyle for the prospect of more is it an american characteristic or is it human nature that we re willing to sacrifice everything we have for the promise of something more i don t know the answer to that question but i saw a wide array of victims put skepticism aside when they thought someone was offering them a pot of gold the idea that something is too good to be true should require us to do our homework and use the tips that corporations provide to educate ourselves or perform any checks of verification we can to reduce our risk the theme of this article is that the moment after you think you re general sense of judgement will prevent you from falling prey to one of their schemes will probably leave you vulnerable but we saw some victims exhibit such poor judgement that it exacerbated what could ve been a minor incident who are the cybercriminals when we read watch and hear exposés about criminals we often hear investigators characterize the criminal in their case as ingenious or brilliant in my limited experience in this world i haven t found cybercriminals ingenious or brilliant most often than not they just kept trying no matter how many times they fail they exhibit some ingenuity and temerity but i never saw one scheme that i considered brilliant or ingenious if their first scheme does not convince us to part with the money we earned these cybercriminals have a no harm no foul attitude there was no crime committed and thus no evidence of wrongdoing depending on the nature of their activity we fraud agents might be able to restrict the cybercriminal s access to their account until they can prove their activity is not suspicious if they can t they just open another account and another until they complete a fraudulent transaction at that point we can link up their accounts and activity to build a narrative long story short most cybercriminals change adapt and tinker with their approach until they can find a victim the key word in that sentence is tinker they might add a little something here or delete something there they are going to try hundreds of different approaches a fraud trainer once told us because they only need one successful scheme to qualify as successful for example professional fraud operations often use botnets compromised servers or spam as a service tools that blast out millions of emails per day success rates are extremely low often 0 01 to 0 1 click open rates so high volume is essential to generate enough victims to be profitable how is that brilliant my guess is that the investigators on the tv exposés on crime are the ones who cracked the case so calling their case s criminal brilliant enhances their profile for the audience we should also note that i base my characterization of cybercriminals on the cases i investigated and we could say i base my personal profile of them on anecdotal information in my experience cybercriminals aren t ingenious or brilliant they just tinker adapt and change their approach until they find the best way to prey on our vulnerabilities some fraudsters aren t a piece of junk who manage to distance themselves from empathy and sympathy because their victim is some anonymous faceless entity on the internet their victims often have online nicknames like rugrat as opposed peter j hansen the electrician who has spent his whole life saving this money this anonymous faceless designation also permits us to characterize victims as the stupid things that dumb people do because we don t talk to them see them or feel their pain other cybercriminals are desperate people living in no hope situations until they are employed by a shady outfit in their home country that exists to defraud victims out of our money their employees have quotas and if they fail to hit their employers numbers be they quantitative or qualitative the employees are back out on their country s desperate streets of abject poverty these shady outfits provide their employees with tight scripts but they also reward employees for creative improvising when the shady enterprises from other countries are caught engaging in fraudulent activity some of the countries make it known they don t encourage such activity but the employees and the shady outfits receive little more than a slap on the wrist the countries don t encourage it but the countries receive a gross domestic product boost from the amount of money that the shady enterprises generate we can only guess this doesn t result in greater taxable revenue for the country as most of the activity is undetected by the government but we can guess that kickbacks are appreciated one vulnerability we all share to ploys generated by cybercriminals is the i m too smart to fall for all that mentality this is also where the stupid things that dumb people do line comes into play in a manner somewhat similar to the original reason man created fictional monsters vampires werewolves and mummies to essentially zoomorphise the inhuman acts of sadistic murder that gives good men and women some comfortable distance between those who would commit mass murder i think we label victims of cybercrimes as dumb and stupid to try to create a comfortable distance from the horrific possibility that this could happen to us too the one thing i would tell people who scoff at the possibility that this could happen to them is i ve talked to people like you every day i talked to midwesterners who appeared to know everything about the internet fast talking new yorkers surfer dudes and individuals with a pleasant southern drawl i talked to little old ladies on a pension fathers with kids in private schools and mothers who thought they could supplement the family s finances i talked to people who would remind you of your family members your neighbors and people who would remind you of you the one thing they all had in common is they never thought they would fall for something like this i thought i d be able to spot something like this they d often say through tears i can t believe i fell for it the fraud calls this was my life savings was such a common phrase we fraud agents became numb to it i loathe writing that all these years later but it happens to us when we hear the same complaint working on a phone line forty hours a week at lunch and on breaks we would talk about the calls we took and in the beginning we talked about the heartbreak and devastation we heard but it happened so often that our conversations switched to a callous competition about the dollar figures we witnessed i took a call today where a guy lost 50 000 that s nothing i took a call last week where a guy lost 200 000 it was our way of dealing with all of the sadness we heard these victims called us to fix the devastation they put their proverbial foot in and we could help them at times if those victims called in in time i wrote out a detailed description of process involved in our calls with custome...