🔗 The "Succeeds" Method

Years ago, Isreel's social security agency started sending me letters that I owed them money due to failure to pay taxes. Social security taxes are automatically deducted from workers' monthly wages, meaning that so long as you're employed, you probably don't owe them any money. At the time, I'd been employed for a long time and knew I owed no money. Even weirder, I would get a similar letter from the agency once a week for several weeks, each time with a different amount I supposedly owed. At first it was something like ₪1200, the next week it was ₪2300, then ₪1600, and so on and so forth.

Eventually, I got tired of these letters and walked to my local branch of the social security agency. With me I took all my paychecks for the past year or two in order to prove that I've been properly paying and owed no money. When reaching the clerk, I started explaining the situation. She cut me off quickly and asked for my ID number. I gave it to her, she input it into her computer, took a quick glance at the monitor, and almost immediately told me "you're right, you don't owe any money", and sent me on my way. I stopped getting those letters after that.

While there could be an innocent explanation to this chain of events (perhaps their software system went haywire, as they are prone to do), I've lived here long enough to recognize the patterns of what we in Israel call "The Succeeds Method", a very common type of scam.

The Succeeds Method (in Hebrew: Shitat Matzliach, שיטת מצליח) is a strategy that attempts to abuse people's lack of attention (or backbone) in order to extract money from them, but in such a way that failure of the attempt would have little to no consequences for the scammer. In the above potential example, I believe the agency sent many such letters to random people with fake debt amounts, in the hopes that some recipients will simply pay the stub, either because they're too preoccupied to investigate whether the debt notices are correct or not, or because they're too scared to fight this state agency. It's enough for one person to unnecessarily pay the stub to make the "operation" worthwhile, as the money collected from one person will probably more than cover the printing and postage costs of the "erroneous" letters.

Here's another common example: there's a take-out restaurant in my city that only operates on the weekends, selling traditional Yemenite foods such as jachnun (one of my favorite foods). My father would go there every other weekend to buy jachnun, and the place would always be packed with people trying to score jachnun for the Sabbath. One day, as he was waiting in line, he noticed that the cashier kept yelling towards the kitchen in the middle of checking out every customer, running back into the kitchen before returning to finish charging the customer. When it was my father's turn, the cashier did the same thing. At first my father thought it was simply due to how hectic it was in the store with all the customers, but when he reached home he noticed the receipt included two items he neither asked for nor received.

The next time he went there, he made sure to take note of what was happening. Once again, he noticed the cashier yelling into the kitchen and running back there for almost every customer in line. When it was his turn, the cashier again ran to the kitchen and back and charged my father, but my father stayed put and read the receipt. Once again, two phantom items were added to the bill. My father told this to the cashier, who was forced to refund the money. This is the main idea of the method and where it's got its name: if the customer doesn't notice it, then the scam succeeded; if they do notice, then the scam did not succeed, but no harm, no foul.

The Succeeds Methods is utilized extensively by scammers and you probably recognize it (with different or no names) from your own country. The scam is so common that it's kinda become legal, by virtue of hardly being prosecuted. Even when such scams are prosecuted, courts will sometimes side with the scammer, with a reasoning that goes something like "every reasonable person would spot the scam, and therefore the onus is on the victim, not the perpetrator", which is an incredible ruling that completely misses the mark.

But this is a court ruling we see more and more every day. Which brings me, as it always does, to the most successful conmanbusinessmen of all time, Harry Bolz. For years, Mr. Bolz has been making countless exciting promises/predictions/guesses that have been taken very seriously by millions of people who lined up to give his company—and thus him—their money, so much so that he became the richest man in history (which apparently makes him a good person or whatever according to many people). A major theme in Harry's Tesla story is that Tesla has/is/will (the timing always changes) create fully autonomous vehicles, which for some unexplained reason will make everybody who buys shares in Tesla rich (seriously, if you ask people "why", the answer is always simply that "it's easy to see").

Throughout the years, Señor Bolz has made various contradicting claims about the technology, sometimes saying it was "solved", that it's "already safer than a human", then that it "will be solved", that it "will be safer than a human", so sometimes it's past tense, sometimes it's future tense, sometimes it "may happen in a year", sometimes it'll "for sure happen in a year".

Tesla was sued over these exact claims, and the company's lawyers presented a very interesting defense: the claims were "corporate puffery", just crazy things that companies say, like how Carlsberg says their beer is "probably the best beer in the world". It's just this fun little slogan we use and everybody knows it's probably not true. Thus, Tesla claimed, when CEO Harry Bolz declared in 2019 that "next year, for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road", every reasonable person should have understood that it was not true, and therefore it was not fraud. Again, I want to emphasise the point that Tesla's official stance on the matter is that it's so obvious they're lying (I'm sorry, "exaggerating"), only an idiot would believe them. The court, of course, accepted this ridiculous defense and ruled in favor of Tesla.

This is the current state of affairs in capitalism, and an impressive evolution of The Succeeds Methods. It's no longer a scam, it's a legitimate tactic. The official court ruling is that if an obvious scammer succeeded in scamming you, it's your fault and your problem. Next time, don't be such a fucking idiot. The crime has been stamped "legal" by virtue of the victim being stupid.

What a time to be alive, we truly are innovating.