More often than I’d like, I hear another story. Someone’s savings gone. Someone’s hard-earned income trapped in yet another scheme. Young people. Older people. Students. Working professionals. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
Watching people fall into scams, not once, not twice, sometimes three times over, is something I cannot make peace with. These are not uneducated people. These are adults. Smart, capable people.
And I find myself asking, how many more times?
The world is moving faster than most of us can keep up with. Crypto. Bitcoin. AI. New financial products seem to appear every other day. People are building wealth in ways that didn’t exist five years ago. The financial world has never been more open, more accessible, more discussed.
And yet, here we are. Scam after scam after scam. The same story on loop. While the world evolves, we are still falling for promises that should have stopped working a long time ago. How are we ever supposed to catch up?
Making money is already difficult. Especially in our state. You push, you save, you sacrifice, and then you hand it over to a random app, a stranger on Instagram, a scheme someone’s cousin swears by, because they promised your money would double. Triple. Guaranteed. No registered financial adviser can guarantee your money will double overnight. No legitimate investment offers risk-free, extraordinary returns. Yet many of us believe a random message, a friend-of-a-friend, or an unknown app without asking basic questions.
We know the signs. We have seen this story before. And still, we fall for it.
There’s an old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Yes, scammers are wrong. They will continue to scam. That’s what they do. But why are we making their job so easy? What is this hunger for a shortcut that makes us suspend everything we know?
Our hard-earned money deserves better than a blind leap of faith. Our community deserves better.
Learn. From wherever feels right. Not necessarily Moneybar. A book. A YouTube video. A conversation with someone you trust. The source matters less than the willingness to learn. At some point, the lesson has to stick. The question is no longer how many scams are out there.
Maybe the question is: when will we finally learn?
Paweü Kayina
Founder Moneybar | Building NE India’s Finance Community
Wednesday, June 24, 2026