[hn_throwaway_99]

I'm not in any way doubting that lots of people were swept up in Amazon drop shipping scams. My argument is that this was not some sort of unique "passive income trap that ate a generation of entrepreneurs".

Years before your spouse enrolled in that Amazon course, people were spending tens of thousands of dollars on Trump University. Many years before that I had a friend that got sucked into the Equinox International MLM scam. Point being those types of promises of easy money after paying for a course, or outright scams, are not something new or unique.

[bombcar]

I think this kind of "get rich quick" scam has always been around (MLM is a perfect example) - the interesting thing about the amazon drop shipping one is that it did actually work for a bit for quite a few people - until China realized they could cut out the middleman and drop ship directly (and things like Temu and friends came into view).

The vast majority of people who fall for things like MLMs will continue to pursue similar scams and never graduate to "real entrepreneurship" even when there's obvious and not terribly difficult paths (most anyone can become a realtor and at least not lose terrible amounts of money, even if they never get to "full-time job" levels).