The weak will always be a target for the evangelists of the world.
I especially felt bad when I worked for adCenter as I would get calls from people who were victims of these scams, even if they didn't know it then. I could tell who they were when they were asking me for advice for optimizing their ads for their ebook on "Making money with online advertising". As I looked into it more I found that the most profitable internet marketing product were ebooks and systems for making money with internet marketing. These people would have sometimes hundreds of campaigns for hundreds of products and the only ones which got any positive return were those directed towards wannabe internet marketers. Most of the advertisers I saw that didn't shut down after a month of spending hundreds of dollars on PPC advertising were those who were selling these IM products and usually only on 'brand keywords'; that's those keywords which were merely the brand names of the products. What they were essentially doing is like a man-in-the-middle attack: someone else sells a person on the product, the customer searches for the product and see the ad which usually looks like it's from the company who made the product and when they click on it the advertiser's affiliate id is added to the URL and they get the commission for someone else's work. I could rant for a while about this, but I think I'm going to go play with my new martini shaker.
I don't know about telling your parents about this, if it can help in anyway. Anyone who would take a chance on an offer too good to be true is probably too gullible to save.
- A few months later they have lost a bundle of money. Many of em believe that it was a personal failing that prevented them from realizing their dreams after the whole things as dried em out.
Human psychology is pretty fascinating. There are all sorts of life experiences where we apply an almost theistic faith-based belief in the way things are.