Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Maybe this is exactly the kind of I mean, I myself have done, of course, this exact thing.

Because you have some idea in your head about like, what the price is, that's fair.

And so in the price seems unfair, you think, well, this is you know, what, you know, what a racket, I'm not going to be part of this.

Absolutely.

I think that the scam that you're describing is exactly the kind of thing that you want to ideally avoid.

Part of the suggestion I'm making is that we often overestimate the risk of that kind of scam, and it sort of

bleeds over into situations in which we actually would prefer to go ahead and do the thing, even though it's going to have a small risk of that kind of a scam.

I see this particular thing happen less often, but this was a sort of a common hustle in Philadelphia when I would be walking around in my student days, which would be that somebody would come up to me with a bus schedule and say, excuse me, is there any way you could help me?

I've missed my bus and I've lost my wallet and I just need...

six dollars to get on the bus and get a transfer out to where my car is parked way out in the suburbs.

And they would have like a pretty elaborate story about what they needed.

I remember finding this to be particularly hard in part because I felt somewhat, I felt like the risk in that case that they were not telling the truth was very high.

But there was also a part of me that thought

You know, if the story is true or even if a sort of a piece of it is true, which is just this is a person in somewhat dire financial circumstances who's asked me for help in a moment when I have the ability to do that.

Even if a piece of the story was true, it was kind of worth it to me.

to give the money given the risk to me, right?

We're talking about $6.

I wasn't going to lose more.

It wasn't a situation where I was going to be stolen from in some other way.

And so the question was, are my sort of sucker antennae potentially steering me away from something that I actually think might be the better choice?