[patio11]

I think you’re missing professionalization. Writing mortgages would sound implausible, too, if each were the product of an artisan, but there is (effectively or actually) a company here, plausibly with an office, payroll, quarterly targets for on-target compensation, etc.

(This scam has unit economics strikingly similar to being a mortgage broker, with lower capita requirements, minus all the pesky compliance bits.)

Also note that a lot of the folks working for this economy don’t have high-quality access to the legitimate side of the software industry, because they live somewhere we don’t/can’t hire.

One of the best things we could do to drain the swamp is outcompeting Evil, Inc for some of their lynchpin specialists and managers.