> Take $10m or $24m from a large corporation, someone is going to notice.
This is the problem with stealing "easy money." It's hard to stop, especially if you don't spend the first portion of money wisely.
It's why card skimmers always get caught, too, eventually. They can't just steal $100,000 and be done with it. That's barely enough for a fully loaded Tesla Model S. They have to keep on stealing, and after a few years of this, are you really going to go back to a 9-5 job paying you $30,000 or less a year for hard work?
So it's not really about criminals "being dumb" about continuing to steal the money, unless you define being dumb the moment they first did it. It's more about them feeling like they have no choice but to keep doing it.
> It's why card skimmers always get caught, too, eventually.
They don't always get caught.
> This is the problem with stealing "easy money." It's hard to stop, especially if you don't spend the first portion of money wisely.
This is very true. Easy money skews how you think. When I was into credit card fraud money became less meaningful. I could get almost anything I wanted for free using stolen cards.
That said, I also kept my activities below what I considered a safe threshold, volumes that would be less likely to cause a large investigation.
> This is the problem with stealing "easy money." It's hard to stop, especially if you don't spend the first portion of money wisely.
Plus there's a weird psychological effect in some people where they feel guilty and actually want to get caught. A few years ago I dropped my wallet somewhere, and someone picked it up and used the contactless cards a couple times. They caught him when, the next day, he was shouting and threatening people and generally acting obnoxious, and was arrested with my wallet (complete with my photo ID) still on him.
Why did the guy suddenly get himself arrested? Why didn't he at least get rid of the wallet first? Maybe there's no connection between the two, but people are complicated.
I doubt that this played a role, that's just a such personality type which predisposes a person for crime and trouble, or the "without brakes" behaviour
...and one of the things that plays into that "personality" type is how they feel about themselves. It's a very common pattern that when people are treated better than what they think they deserve, they feel uncomfortable, and subconsciously do something to sabotage things, so that things go back to the expected and familiar. (I'm preparing to adopt, and that's one of the things we're consistently warned to keep an eye out for: children from chaotic, abusive households doing things to provoke you and make you angry, so that you treat them the way they're used to being treated.)
People are complicated and it's difficult to find individual causes; and everyone responds to things differently. I'm not trying to say that everyone who commits crimes just has low self esteem. People have choices; and there are genetic and other environmental factors (exposure to lead being a big one). But it's quite certain that subconscious "I deserve to be punished" motives are a thing.
> Why did the guy suddenly get himself arrested? Why didn't he at least get rid of the wallet first? Maybe there's no connection between the two, but people are complicated.
Most likely, stealing your wallet was part of impulsive behavior. Your was not first wallet and him being threatening or obnoxious was not his first such time. Most low level criminals are like that.
The name for this in statistics is ergodicity. Nassim Taleb, an expert on this subject, as well as many other authors in risk management have established that even professionals in statistics fare very poorly in understanding ergodicity in real life.
This is the problem with stealing "easy money." It's hard to stop, especially if you don't spend the first portion of money wisely.
It's why card skimmers always get caught, too, eventually. They can't just steal $100,000 and be done with it. That's barely enough for a fully loaded Tesla Model S. They have to keep on stealing, and after a few years of this, are you really going to go back to a 9-5 job paying you $30,000 or less a year for hard work?
So it's not really about criminals "being dumb" about continuing to steal the money, unless you define being dumb the moment they first did it. It's more about them feeling like they have no choice but to keep doing it.