[To medchal]: What's interesting to me about obvious stock scams like GVBP is expressed quite openly by many of the posters who answered you. Ignorance is not what's happening here. They know it's a scam; they know a travel agency has not discovered a cure for cancer; they know that for every dollar made someone will lose a dollar. They simply don't give a crap…. They don't want to be saved from scams, they want to profit from them.
I would submit that this is only part of the story. In perusing the GVBP message board, I detect three main groups of posters:
• Agents and copycats of the professional promoters. They got in early, but still have shares to be unloaded. The more pumping, the higher their profits.
• The kinds of posters you described above: those who know GVBP is a fraud but can’t resist trying to make money from it. These posters are suffering from a collective case of the Fallacy of Composition. They know the p&d scam will end badly for most traders, but each of them is convinced that someone else will end up being the bagholder.
• Those who have no clue and genuinely think GVBP can achieve great things in biotechnology.
Although the third group—the utterly clueless—is the least blameworthy from a moral standpoint, it is perhaps the most troubling. What does it say about the future of humanity that there are so many stupid people?