#69: Lessons from being Scammed

The Communicate to Influence Blog

A few weeks ago my 10 year old daughter was scammed on Roblox. For those of you who are not familiar with Roblox, it is a multi-player game with over 66 million subscribers and 1.4 million concurrent players at any time (May 2023 data). Players collect various artifacts and pets (let’s call them “items”) that can be traded, and within the game these items have value. Most of the players are children, however there are also adults parading as children – as a parent it’s a difficult balance allowing your child to enjoy playing the game while monitoring who they interact with.

Back to the scam. My daughter has been playing Roblox for 4 years and over that time accumulated a large portfolio of items. Players frequently trade items between each other however the process has no ‘escrow’ type arrangement where each parties pledges are safe kept by a third party. Instead, one party must trust the other to make the transfer after they have made theirs.

On this occasion, you guessed it, the other player didn’t transfer what they had promised and just disappeared into the ether with a large share of the most valuable items my daughter had collected over the past 4 years. She was distraught and in this case, there was nothing daddy could do to fix it. This was however a wonderful opportunity to reinforce many of the lessons I had been trying to teach her for some time:

1. Listen to those that have your best interests at heart: The counsel of those that we know are putting our interests first should be taken seriously when they have relevant experience. Only now my daughter realises that I was trying to protect her in telling her not to trade with unknown counterparts, rather than wanting to stop her fun. Be careful here however, just because someone really care about us does not mean they are right. When I was 23 years old and barely two years into my banking career, I was offered a job by a second tier regional private bank on double the salary. My uncle, who knew nothing about financial markets, told me to take the offer. I then asked my boss who told me it would be a grave mistake to make a move down in company quality at this early stage of my career. Thankfully, I heeded my bosses advice.

2. If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t: The counterpart offered my daughter a very high amount of robux, the in-game currency used by Roblox which can be purchased for hard currency by credit card. A simple calculation would have shown this was a fake offer however, at 10 years old my daughter was blinded by the number. When it’s too good to be true stop and think. What is it that you're missing?  

3. Learn from mistakes: We all make mistakes and that’s fine as long as we learn from them. My daughter was scared that I would be angry with her for being scammed. I told her I’d only be angry if she let the same thing happen again. To paraphrase Einstein; “the definition of stupidity is to to do the same thing twice and expect a different result”. Any environment that stifles the ability to make mistakes also stifles creativity. This is as relevant in the workplace as at home. We should celebrate mistakes that lead to learning and improvement.

Finally, I learnt something valuable about my daughter during this experience. Within an hour of the event, she had calmed down, the tears stopped, and a plan was put into action to recover all the lost items. Plan #1 consisted of daddy buying enough robux to repurchase all the lost items in the open market! While I applaud the sheer cheek of proposing that I pay for her mistake, this did not happen! She is now proceeding with plan #2 which is earning them back the hard way. Seeing this resilience in a 10 year old is reassuring as I’m sure she’ll need to fall back on it many times.

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