Thank you for sharing this useful advice, especially for the young, bored, naive, or desperate multitudes to whom these scammers are appealing. But I’d take it one step further. As a famous author once told my students when he came to our campus, “I have two bits of advice: pay the rent, and follow your dreams. In that order.” Money is essential to cover basic expenses, but it should not be an end in itself—mistaken for happiness or fulfillment.
Rather, there are four things worth doing with our lives: learning, teaching, healing, and creating. So any livelihood we pursue should involve at least one or two, but preferably all four of these goals. Anything else is slavery. If desperate, and you must enslave yourself to make someone else rich by tedious, mind-numbing labor, do so—but make it temporary. Plan your own emancipation, once you’ve saved enough money to try something better and more personally fulfilling and preferably, something better for your community and planet as well!