The fix for stupid is to improve education. Robust education of everyone else is also what is needed to drive con artists out of business.
This works, but only up to a point. There comes a point where too much intelligence and education starts working against you.
One of the most intelligent people I ever knew, who had an off-the-charts IQ, was extremely well informed on a number of subjects, was widely considered to be an expert in his technical field. He also managed to get conned out of several thousand dollars by some local mobsters.
This guy (I'll call him S) was a partner in a dot-com startup back in the late 90's. I dated him briefly and was also doing some consulting for the start-up, in order to get their business model and sales plan set up. They had a good idea for a technical product, or more precisely a service, but they needed a scalable way to sell and distribute accounts. As the business got up and running, it became evident they needed a lot more as well, but this was back in their early days before their major business failure.
Anyway, S was approached by some acquaintances who happened to be of the organized crime persuasion, who had heard that three used servers from a bank were available for purchase. They thought there was a chance there could be criminally useful information still left on them, and that the data may not have been wiped, but they couldn't afford to be noticed buying the servers. So, they wanted to do it through S, who would receive the price of two servers in advance. He could, if he wished, buy the third for himself. (He decided to do this, because he needed a server of this type and it was available at less than a third of what it would ordinarily cost). The money he was advanced was in cash, all real bills. All he had to do was buy the servers and have them shipped to the appropriate location. Two servers would go to the mobsters; the one that had never processed sensitive information would go to S.
"So basically, I'm getting a great deal on a server, and a small commission besides." Said S when he called me to brag about the easy money he was making wheeling and dealing. He was in a pretty good mood. The dot-com startup was in its early stages (as in, they hadn't mismanaged it into the ground yet, but that's another story), and everything seemed bright, shiny, and full of opportunity.
I tried to talk S out of doing the deal. "Doing business with mobsters is bad news, unless you're one of them. You're not. They might take care of their own, but it's like in poker. If you can't tell who the mark is, it means you're the mark."
"These guys just aren't very bright."
"They don't have to be. I call this my Law of Divided Attention: no matter how intelligent you are, if your attention is divided, you can and will be outwitted by dumber people who are putting their full effort and attention into getting around you."
"You still don't understand. They think they're going to steal social security numbers. I've told them the servers have probably been wiped, but they don't believe me. They're screwing themselves, I tell you. They don't know very much about computers."
"Have you told them they're barking up the wrong tree?"
"They won't listen."
"How many different ways have you tried?"
"It's not my job to educate them. If they want to pay money for information that isn't there, that's their decision. That's how it works in the big leagues. You'll understand once you have a bit of business experience in the real world."
"I have more than ten years of business experience in the real world. Roughly the same as you, but I started at a much earlier age. One of the things I've learned is that you don't do business with scam artists, unless you want to be scammed, or unless you want to become like them. Another thing I've learned is that if you see someone setting themselves up for a fall, you don't help them to do it."
"You just don't understand how things are done in America."
Nothing I could tell S would keep him from following through. He did the deal, bought the servers, and called the shipping company, which boxed up the servers and carried them away. Everything was done openly and above-board. All he had to pay for was the insurance and shipping charges.
It's a good thing the servers were insured for their full replacement value, which was substantially higher than what they'd paid for them. All three mysteriously fell off the back of the truck they were on, and were destroyed. Well, I say it was good for the mobsters, who cashed in the insurance policy and collected the insured value of all three servers. It wasn't so good for S, who was out every cent he'd paid for the server he didn't get, and who'd spent most of his "commission" paying for the shipping and insurance. Basically, they'd used him to front a small amount of money for their insurance fraud scheme.
From the mobsters' point of view, it was never about the computers or the data they supposedly thought they could harvest. The product could just as easily have been antique furniture or a huge vat of maple syrup. All they needed to do was to find a mark who knew enough about the product to fixate on the product instead of watching where the money was going, or thinking about contingencies or insurance fraud setups. It was classic misdirection and I'm not sure that more education for S would have helped him avoid being hustled.
For what it's worth, S's dot-com business he ran with his partners never amounted to much. Due to his poor decision making, it did eventually fail despite his extremely high IQ, his advanced education and technical skills, and his vast knowledge of how things are apparently done in America.