Originally published at: Florida principal quits after writing $100k check to scammer pretending to be Elon Musk | Boing Boing
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I guess being a “very smart lady” doesn’t cover street smarts.
(And, the only person who can stop a bad administrator with a pen is a good administrator with a pen?)
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People who feel the need to tell others how smart they are usually aren’t. See also, Dunning-Kruger Effect.
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Like at Tesla and SpaceX?
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See also “very stable genius”.
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“I am a very smart lady. Well-educated. I fell for a scam,” McGee said.
…and she had been warned by staff at the school that her Elon was an obvious fraud
One of these statements suggest the other is false.
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It’s weird how so many of Elon’s mindless fans say that same thing, but after talking to them for a few minutes, nobody believes them.
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Whew, I thought I was taking too many crazy pills again.
...nope, just the normal amount 💊💊💊
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I have to admit, I never thought about it like that but it makes perfect sense.
Those aren’t “mistakes and typos” at all, “it’s a feature not a bug.”
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It’s truly amazing how obviously smart people can sometimes fall for the dubmest scams. One of the most amazing cases of this I know of, a psychiatrist at UCI lost millions to Nigerian scammers. His own son had to sue him to stop him from sending them money.
How does one individual at a school have authority to even write a check that big, that’s my question. My experience with institutions is that the bigger the check the more approvals it needs to go through.
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Doesn’t matter how smart you are- all it takes is one stupid decision to wreck your life. No one can be brilliant 100% of the time. That’s why we have communities, or whatever, bureaucracy if that’s what’s needed, to keep otherwise “smart” people from making stupid mistakes.
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The title was staring you in the face: Florida woman quits as principal…
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Excuse me, I’d just like to ask a question, what does god need with a starship? (or $100,000)
All she had to do was give a guy who was representing Musk 100 grand and Musk would give the shcool 6 million. It wasn’t even a pretend Musk, it was a pretend Musk lackey.
It seems it took 4 months to groom her and by her definition the last guy and Marge and Boebert and the like are all groomers.
She reportedly believed the person she made the check out to was Musk’s right-hand man.
“Matching funds with this guy and he was supposed to give like $6 million to the school,”
McGee told a packed audience she was taken in by a fake Elon Musk, someone posing online as the space pioneer. Someone she’d been talking with for at least four months despite being warned by staff that the person was a fraud. She claims he groomed her.
“Grooming is when you talk to somebody and you believe in them, and they get you to trust them that this is really real, and so I fell for it,” McGee said.
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But it is now known that scammers are using AI to generate more convincing emails and letters, without the ghastly spelling errors, too. 
You mean (DUN DUN DUNNNNN) Regulation?
Wash your mouth out you market-restricting commie!
/s?
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According to an article she needed approval of the board for anything over 50 grand, not a second signature, just approval. That’s the weird part, if she could still write the check, so much for approval.
I’m tech support, website guy, email administrator for a small/tiny non profit. It wasn’t until one of the members wrote a check for 800 bucks to a scam that they instituted 2 signatures required on all checks. I would have thought that was in place for a school and since when do principals write checks out of the school account?
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Yeah exactly, I would think there would be one person / group with contract approval authority, and someone else with check writing authority. Perhaps with a simpler process for purchases below some very low threshold, or with pre-approved vendors.
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In a school district, a principal shouldn’t be the person who is approving contracts or writing checks. The district should have a legal team for contract vetting and a separate group that approves expenses and invoices. A principal may have authority to draw on a limited account for certain smallish expenses. But almost everything should have been getting invoiced to the district finance dept
This entire thing is so fishy
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